CFP: Childhood and the Production of National Ideals

Hi all,

I am working to put together a panel proposal for next year's American
Studies Association conference, which will take place in San Antonio
Texas in November 2010. Please see the CFP below for information. And
please forward as appropriate.

Thanks,
Cynthia

Childhood and the Production of National Ideals

This panel seeks papers that examine the ways in which children are
positioned during national moments of crisis. Building upon recent
scholarship that interrogates the placement of the child at the center
of political debates in the U.S., we aim to understand how childhood
functions as a key site in the production of national ideals. How do
children - both in their conceptualization and their actualization -
provide the chain that binds the family and the nation? Which children
are thought to embody the future and thus must be saved for the sake
of the nation, and which children are imagined to pose a perverse and
degenerative threat to familial and national futurity? In what ways
are some children seen as working to preserve the nation either
through participating in activist campaigns with their parents or
through learning the qualities of “good citizens” from their teachers?
How does the management of children’s agency - by simultaneously
celebrating their creativity and exploiting their malleability -
secure the role of the child in relation to the national body? When
might the child’s playful engagement with citizenship open space for a
critique of the nation-state? We encourage papers that investigate
questions of children and childhood in relation to the intersections
of gender and sexual identities, structures of class, racial
formations, and hierarchies of dis/ability.

Please send an abstract of no more than 500 words, a CV, and any
questions to lizmontegary@ucdavis.edu.

The deadline for submissions is January 15, 2010.