Call for Papers

Issue #54: Why Indigenous Children’s and Young Adult Literatures Matter

In Issue 54 of the Bank Street Occasional Paper Series, we extend and honor Daniel Heath Justice’s pivotal work, Why Indigenous Literatures Matter, to highlight and celebrate Indigenous Children’s and Young Adult Literature (ICYAL). We seek submissions that speak to the ways authors, teachers, librarians, students, and community members engage ICYAL as it changes the landscape of how Indigeneity is represented, speaking to and reimagining the diverse values, knowledges, dreams, and lives of Indigenous children, youth, adults, and communities.

The field of Children’s and Young Adult Literature has expanded greatly over the last decade and nowhere has this been more needed than within Indigenous literature. ICYAL texts are created by Indigenous authors and focus on Indigenous peoples and topics important to Indigenous ways of being. In this literature, Indigenous children and youth experience life in the near past, as in Louise Erdrich’s The Birchbark House (1999); in the present, as in Carole Lindstrom’s We are Water Protectors (2020); and in the future, as in Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves (2017). In the work of Darcie Little Badger, Indigenous youth are adventurers (2020). Indigenous young people become superheroes in David A. Robertson’s writing (2017, 2018, 2019), and in Jen Ferguson’s world in The Summer of Bitter and Sweet, Indigenous youth participate in everyday life, working at an ice cream shop (2022). The life experiences portrayed in ICYAL are crucial the centering of the diversity of Indigeneity, representing a vast array of distinct Indigenous nations and communities, and at the same time, speaking to universal human experiences. Muscogee author Cynthia Leitich Smith reminds us:

“…[W]hat fiction does best is to provide an opportunity for developing interpersonal relationships between real live kids and those who live only on the page. For Native readers, that may mean connecting with a character who embodies aspects of themselves. For non-Native readers, that may mean gaining cross-cultural understanding and empathy.” (Leitich Smith, 2020)

Articles published in this issue will provide readers with opportunities to learn more about ICYAL texts and how to use them responsibly and in relationship to Indigenous peoples, supporting the creation of conceptual and practical tools for anti-oppressive education. Offering readings and interpretations of this literature can open spaces of celebration of Indigenous ways of survivance, serve as resistance to settler-colonial logic, and unsettle the Western epistemological hegemony often practiced in schools.

For this issue, we seek submissions from an array of participants, including scholars of ICYAL and education, teachers using ICYAL, students reading ICYAL, and authors writing ICYAL. Questions addressed might include (but are not limited to):

• What might ICYAL teach us about Indigenous ways of knowing and being historically, in the present, and in future imaginations?
• What insights about ICYAL may help readers, including educators, to understand ICYAL more deeply?
• What tools might be effective for utilizing ICYAL in classroom or community spaces?
• What should non-Indigenous teachers and readers of ICYAL consider when engaging this literature?
• What insights can we gain from child/youth experiences of reading these texts?
• What do authors of ICYAL hope readers will consider or experience in reading these texts?

We are interested in essays and manuscripts (no more than 5000 words) as well as short films, audio essays, photo essays, and small-scale artistic products. Only unpublished pieces that are not under review by other publications are eligible for consideration. Although not required, we invite those interested to reach out to the editors to pitch ideas and receive feedback and support. For more information or if you would like to discuss your ideas, please contact guest editors Joaquin Muñoz at joaquin.munoz@ubc.ca or Dawn Quigley at dawnquigleywriter@gmail.com.

Deadline for Submissions: December 1, 2024

Submission Guidelines

Issue #53: Speculative Youth Action: Imagining Educational Futures Through Participatory Social Dreaming

In Issue 53 of the Bank Street Occasional Paper Series, we will focus on productive ruptures associated with Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR). Productive ruptures are moments that go against typical outcomes and experiences of engaging in critical youth research and practice that are vital to the overall process. YPAR is an innovative approach that centers youth as they engage in research to address urgent problems in their own communities. YPAR pedagogy explicitly creates spaces for young people to investigate the root causes of injustice. Our goal in this issue is to open a space for dreamers of impossible possible futures, for those who speculate, and for the youth who bring speculation to action.

In this issue, we introduce Speculative YPAR, in which youth become architects of change, reshaping and redefining their futures beyond established boundaries. Speculative YPAR represents all critical youth research that treats reality as something constantly changing, where young people not only dissect existing narratives but actively co-create new narratives. It challenges linear, overly academic, product-driven YPAR accounts that serve the needs of the researcher over the youth. We want to hear how critical youth research and practices center speculation in (re)imagining educational futures that are equitable and just.

This call comes in response to the problem of youth, teachers, and community educators experiencing the academic discipline of YPAR as unattainable to them, even though they have been living YPAR organically for years. Through this call, we seek to return YPAR to those who live it. We insist that youth must be central to knowledge creation in research, theory, and practice. In practice, young people have always been behind social change. We welcome accounts of young people, preferably written or co-written by youth, challenging injustices through collective speculative actions and participatory social dreaming.  While academic pieces are welcome, we also encourage practitioners not directly associated with a university to submit pieces demonstrating how they work with youth to facilitate speculative youth action and participatory social dreaming. If you are part of a community-based organization, a teacher, a counselor, a community leader, a researcher, a parent, a grandparent, or an older sibling helping young people transform their school, community, and/or the world, then we want to hear from you.

We are interested in short films, audio essays, photo essays, and small-scale artistic products. We also accept essays and manuscripts (no more than 5000 words), Only unpublished pieces that are not under review by other publications are eligible for consideration. Although not required, we invite those interested to reach out to the editors to pitch ideas and receive feedback and support. For more information or if you would like to discuss your ideas, please contact guest editors Ricardo Martinez at rfm5798@psu.edu) or Ezequiel Aleman at ezequiel.aleman@utec.edu.uy.

Deadline for Submissions: June 1, 2024

Submission Guidelines