ChLA 2025 - Shortcuts and Tesseracts:  Time/Space in Children's Literature and Culture

Scholars of youth literature, media, and culture have long been exploring the various ways children’s and young adult texts force new considerations of time and space. As we gather in virtual space for ChLA 2025, we invite presentations around these two topics. There will be diverse opportunities for engagement and the conference may include online workshops or conversation sessions in lieu of our traditional themed lunches, for example. We hope to accommodate as many time zones as possible, as we value our international community of scholars.

Similar to the ways in which Meg Murry’s understanding of reality’s dimensional markers erodes—and expands—after Charles Wallace’s explanation of tesseract, this conference encourages interrogation of the intersections found in young people’s texts between physics and metaphysics, phenomenon and the phantasmagoric.

Conceptualizations of time are fundamental to childhood as a cultural idea, and childhoods are often defined by their contexts. In what ways do stories about and for youth subvert and rework these limitations? How does queer time and/or crip time reshape notions of time as progress? How is time conceptualized or experienced differently in children’s texts? How have notions of teleological, progressive, or developmental time been affirmed or resisted in texts for young readers? How have digital and online spaces impacted children’s literature and culture? What role does or should generative AI play in our research and our pedagogy?