Call for Chapters: Childhood Ex Machina: Children, Pedagogy, and Science Fiction; abstracts due due 7/1/17

Call for Chapters: Childhood Ex Machina: Children, Pedagogy, and
Science Fiction; abstracts due due 7/1/17

Childhood Ex Machina: Children, Pedagogy, and Science Fiction
In the series Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and
Materialist Theories (Springer)
Editors: David W. Kupferman, University of Hawaiʻi–West Oʻahu
Andrew Gibbons, Auckland University of Technology

Whether through the pedagogical considerations of the short stories of
Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury, the ontological and metaphysical
complications of childhood in AI, the image of the parasitic pregnancy
of a xenomorph in Ridley Scott’s Alien franchise, or any myriad of
other examples, science fiction has long offered entry-points for
analyses of children and childhood. The concern of this edited book is
to explore constructions of children, childhood, and pedagogy through
the multiple lenses of science fiction as a method of inquiry.
Additionally it seeks new ways of theorizing the intersections of
childhood and sci-fi, as well as their effects on the social
imaginary.

The general frame of the book treats science fiction from the Kantian
perspective of aesthetics as a first philosophy. In this way, sci-fi
is useful since it is both disinterested and there is no requirement
that it be based in fact. To that end, this book aims not to define
science fiction as method, but to approach conceptions and
applications of ‘science fiction’ as broadly as possible,
acknowledging the fluid boundaries of genre between science fiction,
horror, and ʻthe weird and the eerieʻ (Fisher). The call for chapters
therefore entertains a wide range of theoretical and methodological
approaches to re-membering children, childhood, and pedagogy,
including but not limited to the deployment of new materialism,
speculative realism, and object-oriented ontology, among other
philosophical interpretations.

This book invites chapter authors to both rethink and reconceptualize
definitions of childhood and pedagogy through an imagining of
possibilities – past, present, and future – enabled by the aesthetic
turn to science fiction (in all its potential meanings). Possible
questions might include:
• How does science fiction allow us to engage with questions
concerning childhood?
• How does sci-fi highlight the use of children as a plot device that
may actually open up spaces for new analyses of socio-cultural
productions of the child?
• How do roles and positionalities of children shift in sci-fi from a
comparative perspective?
• How does a new materialist or speculative realist theorizing affect
popular understandings of the artifacts of childhood as depicted in
sci-fi and horror tales (e.g., dolls, toys, games, etc.)?
• What effect does the social imaginary, as rendered through sci-fi in
various media, have on our perceptions of children as either innocents
or monsters?
• How does sci-fi reconfigure relations of power between and among
children and adults?
• What do dystopic and utopian imaginings of childhood and pedagogy
reveal about contemporary society?
• What is a posthumanist ethics in sci-fi representations of children?
• How does sci-fi employ technology to complicate our knowledge of
childhood and produce new subjectivities?
• How does sci-fi invite us to understand childhood as machinic?

Submission Procedure:
Authors are invited to submit an abstract of 500 words (including key
references) on or before July 1, 2017, clearly explaining the relevant
focus and theoretical aspects of their proposed chapter, along with a
short bio of each author. Proposals should be submitted through email
to kupferma@hawaii.edu. Authors of submitted proposals will be
notified by July 15, 2017, about the status of their proposals. Full
chapters (7500 – 8500 words) are expected to be submitted by December
15, 2017.

This book is expected to be published in 2018.

Contact Person:
David W. Kupferman, kupferma@hawaii.edu