The Children and Youth Studies Caucus joins scholars who engage in interdisciplinary perspectives on the individual experiences, social conditions, and rights of children and youth in both historical and contemporary contexts. Children and Youth Studies aims to understand the complex experiences and conditions of young people in global, national, and local settings.

TWO CALLS FOR PAPERS, ASA 2026 (Chicago, Oct. 22-25)

Proposed Panel: How Children’s Culture Fights Adult Authoritarians; or, Improvising Against the Machine

Proposals due: Feb. 15, 2026

As the regime dismantles the systems upon which children (and all of us) depend, the cultures of childhood are reminding us how play, improvisation, and humor can be tools of resistance. Trump and his lackeys defund public education, attack public libraries, and undermine public health. RFK Jr.’s anti-vax lunacy is putting a generation of young people at risk. In response, from Portland to New York, activists have deployed elements and materials of children’s culture to expose the lies and cruelty of the administration’s policies. Recognizable figures from popular children’s media have popped up at ICE protests, with activists  dressing as Pikachu, unicorns, and Spongebob Squarepants. Protest signs that revise Mary Poppins’ “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” to “Super-callous fragile racist sexist Nazi POTUS” have also appeared in public spaces. Children themselves have engaged in political discourse, from viral TikToks to school walkouts. This panel invites papers that address this  desire for imaginative, non-violent modes of encountering state-violence, enabled by materials, media, or locations associated with childhood.

What dominant narratives of childhood are being strengthened and disrupted through these tactics? What does it mean for adults to draw on materials associated with childhoods to enact their politics in public? What does it mean for children to not draw on these messages to enact their own political messages in public? Are children improvising and enacting other modes of protest that invite spectators to imagine new forms of childhood agency, political engagement, and citizenship? To what extent does the protest feature improvisation that invites participants’ agency, and to what extent does it stage a planned appropriation of figural ideas of the child?

This panel invites submissions that consider the role of children’s culture in publics, from protests to courtrooms, from print to visual media.  We welcome submissions from a range of disciplines that consider how adults utilize children’s cultures, how children themselves are participating in sociopolitical dialogue on a range of issues, and how the improvisational nature of some protest, disruption, and discourse speaks to children and childhood.

Submissions:

By February 15, 2026, please submit your proposed title, abstract (approx. 300 words), 2-page CV, and short biography to caucus co-chair Philip Nel (philnel@ksu.edu). Please note that should your proposal be accepted, you must be a member of the ASA by March 1, 2026.

Proposed Panel: Childhood in the Meantime: Interrupting Temporalities of Youth

Proposals due: Feb. 15, 2026

The Children and Youth Studies Caucus seek panelists for a session entitled “Childhood in the Meantime: Interrupting Temporalities of Youth” for the American Studies Association 2026 meeting. We seek papers that consider the multiple temporalities that children are expected to inhabit: normative developmental timelines, trajectories oriented toward futures that adhere to the state-sanctioned scripts for proper adult citizenship, and culturally-accepted deviations of “sideways growth” that can ultimately be assimilated into dominant narratives of childhood presents and futures.

We are interested in papers that explore how children are disciplined into proper time, as well as children and childhoods that deviate from these expected, mandated temporalities. Drawing on the conference theme “Improvisation,” we are interested in how childhood itself is a time of improvisation. When is improvisation punished and when is it celebrated? How does improvisation–characterized by ephemerality and imagination–brush up against the adults, institutions, and systems that work to render childhood structured and predictable? How might attending to children’s improvisations help us rethink the narratives, methods, and frameworks through which childhood is studied?

We welcome interdisciplinary approaches that consider archives, ethnographic encounters, media forms, legal and medical discourses, and/or lived experiences to trace how improvisational temporalities of childhood take shape. We especially encourage submissions that examine how state, familial, and/or institutional efforts to regulate childhood temporalities disproportionately impact marginalized youth, as well as how children generate improvisational modes of survival, pleasure, and futurity in the face of these constraints.

Possible Topics Include (but are not limited to):

• schools and temporal discipline

• how the juvenile justice system suspends and restructures childhood

• cyclical / state time and the child welfare system

• children’s play and improvisation

• children’s improvisation during crises (e.g., ecological, political, public health)

• queer childhoods and heteronormative futurity

• trans childhoods and futurities

• crip childhoods and reconfiguring developmental timelines

• the pacing of racialized childhoods (e.g, arrested development, infantilization, adultification)

• temporalities of generations and communities in the digital age / age of social media

• methods for studying childhoods that are out of time (e.g., understudied, fragments in the archive)

Submissions:

By February 15, 2026, Please send your 300-word proposal and a bio to caucus co-chair Mary Zaborskis (mzz5335@psu.edu). Please note that should your proposal be accepted, you must be a member of the ASA by March 1, 2026.

Stay tuned for more CFPs and events!

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