The Youth Literature and Media Area of the Midwest Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association invites papers for the 2017 MPCA/ACA conference in St. Louis, MO, October 18-22.
There is much to query about the kids these days. This past year we saw the rise of Teen Vogue as a political voice, but a simultaneous decline in the percentage of youth who voted. Millennials now outnumber baby boomers, but are perhaps becoming old news themselves as Forbes reports Millennials are now outnumbered by Generation Z. Transgender youth have been at the center of debates over school bathroom policies, civil rights, privacy, safety, and identity. Meanwhile, Dorothy Wang became “funemployed” once again.
We are looking for proposals for papers on any aspect of Youth Literature and Media, from the latest YA best seller to my nine year old son’s YouTube channel. This area takes an expansive approach to youth, literature, and media. We are interested in youth as producers and consumers of literature and media, representations of children and youth in literature and media, and the study of lit and media aimed at children and youth.
What more to chew on? How about:
- Shifting definitions of youth
- Revisiting youth through nostalgia, revivals, and reboots of old TV shows
- Youth culture becoming adult culture
- Millennials, elections, politics, and policies
- Adult audiences of YA Lit and other youth culture
- Images and discussion of youth in the news
- Youth and Social Media: where the kids go when their parents join Facebook
- Youth access to media
- Youth and traditional, digital, and media literacy…and illiteracy
- Moral panics around youth
- Youth and technology
- Youth subversion of mainstream discourses
- “Youth” and intersectionality
- Rural youth
- Youth in the Trump Era
- What’s absent from representations of youth in media?
Please submit proposals of single papers or full panels at http://submissions.mpcaaca.org by April 30, 2017.
More info about the conference is available here: http://mpcaaca.org/
For questions and queries about the Youth Literature and Media Area, please contact Patrick Cox, patrick.cox@rutgers.edu
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