ChLA 2020 Conference
Hyatt Regency Bellevue | Bellevue, Washington
June 18-20, 2020

Sustainability Through Story: Eco-Justice, Children’s Literature, and Childhood

The Information School (iSchool) at the University of Washington invites ChLA conference attendees to Washington State, home to twenty-nine federally-recognized tribes and several non-federally-recognized tribes. The University of Washington occupies the land of the Coast Salish people. This land touches the shared waters of all tribes and bands within the Suquamish, Tulalip, and Muckleshoot nations, and this context is essential to our understanding of the Pacific Northwest region. Our conference will be held in Bellevue near Seattle, an area known for its commitment to eco-activism as well as for its relationship to technological and social advancement.  The impact of these relationships on the natural environment as well as on the lives of Indigenous and non-Indigenous people is of paramount importance in this discussion. This Call for Papers invites an expansive array of interdisciplinary topics on the cultural, political, historical, and contemporary impact of children’s literature in relationship to the environment. While ChLA always welcomes topics of interest related to children’s literature, children’s culture, childhood studies, and related fields, we encourage scholars to give particular consideration to the following topics:

• Portrayal of the environment in children’s literature
• Analysis of the visual or performing arts as subjects of ecological critique
• Young people and ecological justice activism in children’s literature
• Young people’s reactions to climate change
• Ecocriticism and children’s literature
• Ecocriticism, Indigenous Studies, and childhood
• Indigenous futurisms
• Discussions of the connections between racial violence and the outdoors (as in A Wreath for Emmett Till, Strange Fruit, How High the Moon)
• Animals and non-human species in children’s literature  
• Representations of the environment in nonfiction, creative nonfiction, speculative fiction/fantasy
• Biographies for young people about environmental activists
• Authors and/or illustrators whose work focuses on children and/or animals in the outdoors
• Decentering anthropocentrism and Whiteness
• Space and place in graphic narratives, such as picture books & comics  
• Analyses of genders, sexualities, and environments, including LGBTQIA+
• Representations of environmentalist movements in texts for young people
• Addressing tensions between sustainability and development
• Postcolonial critiques of space and place in children’s literature; postcolonial ecocriticism
• Representations of children’s experiences of the environment in urban spaces
• Decolonizing representations of land in children’s literature
• Posthumanism and its relationship to the environment
• Fake or fantastical science in texts for young people