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

ChLA 2025 Virtual Conference
June 9-14, 2025

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?

We welcome submissions on any topic pertaining to children’s literature and culture, including topics such as:

• Queer time and temporalities

• Crip time(s)

• Time-slip and time-travel narratives
  Virtual futures/futurity

• Historical fiction

• Indigenous futurisms
  Afrofuturism/Africanfuturism

• Myth and folklore

• Generative AI

• Speculative temporalities

• Boundary crossings, including genre

• Poetics of space / poetics of time

• Childhood and adolescent imaginaries

We are in the process of considering format(s) and opportunities for engagement. It is likely that some or all presentations will be pre-recorded for better and wider accessibility. Presenters will be asked to indicate their preference for pre-recorded or live presentation when submitting their proposal, with confirmation provided at the time of acceptance. We remain committed to best practices for accessibility.

ChLA Welcomes Fully Formed Panel and Roundtable Submissions for the 2025 Conference

To align with practices of other conferences of our size and to facilitate the work of the Paper Selection and Program Committee this year, we are encouraging more members familiar with ChLA to organize panels and roundtables rather than submitting individual papers for consideration. To facilitate this, ChLA will assist in circulating panel and roundtable calls for papers (CFPs) to members. ChLA will still consider individual papers. Panels should have 3-4 proposed participants; roundtables might feature 5-7 participants.

For Member-Organized Panel Submissions

The deadline for submitting a panel CFP to ChLA for circulation to the membership is October 18. Panel CFPs should be no more than 300 words long and should include a title for the panel and the name and contact email of the organizer.  Please use this link to submit a panel cfp.

ChLA will compile and circulate a list of all CFPs. Members interested in participating in a proposed panel will submit their paper proposal directly to the panel organizer and panel organizers will notify those that are selected by November 15. All panel and roundtable submissions, like individual paper submissions, will need to be submitted through this (Whova) portal. Panel organizers should submit these by December 2.

Panel Organizers will compile and submit the panel abstracts to this system (which may be revised to a maximum of 500 words, to include an account of how the panelists fit together) and list of participants, including paper title and abstract for each.  This process will also be followed by ChLA committees that run "guaranteed panels" at the conference. 

For Individual Paper Submissions 

Those submitting individual papers for consideration should prepare a paper title, an abstract of no more than 200 words, a brief (100-word) bio, and five pertinent keywords for submission to the committee. 

Acceptances for pre-organized panels will be sent out by November 15. 

Individual paper acceptances will be sent out to members in February.

It is likely that panels may run 1 hour rather than the more typical 1.5 hours, so panel presenters should plan on 15 minute papers.

Submission Deadline:  December 2, 2024

For submissions, go to: https://www.childlitassn.org/2025-virtual-conference