Call for Papers:Borders, Bridges and Belonging:Neighborhoods in Global Children’s and Young Adult Literature and Culture

Global Committee Panel on

"Borders, Bridges and Belonging:

Neighborhoods in Global Children’s and Young Adult Literature and Culture"

Deadline: September 30, 2025

11:59 p.m. (Eastern US Standard Time)

Children's Literature Association Conference

May 28-30, 2026

Omni William Penn Hotel

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA

The Global Committee of the Children’s Literature Association has chosen to alternate its annual panels between specific geographic or topological focal points and experiential or psychological themes that encourage transnational discussions. At ChLA 2025 we hosted a virtual meet and greet highlighting the work of the Global Committee Blog. The 2024 Global Committee panel focused on “Memory.” The 2023 Global Committee panel centered on “Islands.” For the 2026 ChLA conference, we seek paper proposals that explore what it means to be a neighbor—helpful, harmful or otherwise—or to create, maintain, inhabit, or leave a neighborhood, particularly in a global context.  

Preference will be given to analyses from a global perspective and to papers that examine texts originally written in languages other than English and/or created by authors and illustrators from communities beyond Anglo-American children’s and YA publishing traditions, including global indigenous communities. Topics could include but are not limited to the following in relation to children’s and young adult literature, literary practices, and media consumption:

• Neighborhoods as communities, including communities across borders or barriers

• Shared spaces or forced proximity

• Strangers becoming friends, frenemies, threats, lovers, or family

• Relational complexity: Neighbors as agents of solidarity and support versus neighbors as spies and informants

• Constructions of childhood neighborhoods, real or imagined

• Disappearance and rebuilding of local or global neighborhoods

• Intersectionality (race, gender, sexuality, class, age, ability, religion, culture, language, etc.) in cross-border neighborhood narratives

• Online neighbors and neighborhoods (e.g., Digital communities [or migration)] and storytelling)

• Neighborhoods, exile, and nostalgia

• Migration, displacement, liminality, and diaspora (including migration and refugeeism within one’s own country, state or neighborhood; transit camps; temporary housing for displaced peoples )

• Borders, boundaries, bridges: neighborhood identities and edges

• Coming “home”: transitions between private and public spaces

• Linguistic neighborhoods (e.g., use of storytelling, poetry, and performance art in migrant/refugee communities, or language or art as a mark of neighborhood identity)

• Ethics in the global neighborhood

• Climate neighborhoods, climate threat & environmental displacement

• Sectarian violence and mass movement of peoples (e.g., Partition of the Subcontinent)

• Gossip, scandal and tea: Neighborhood social dynamics

• Neighborhood flavors: food culture and identity

• Utopic or dystopic neighborhoods 

• In honor of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, the Neighborhood of Make-Believe

• Also in honor of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood: Slowing down and allowing time to process and to talk honestly about big feelings and everyday life

• In scary or challenging times, Mr. Rogers often is credited with a lesson that he learned from his mother: “Look for the helpers. There are always people who are helping.” How are people helping to build or strengthen what it means to be a good neighbor in a global context?

The panel will be held in person at the 2026 ChLA conference in Pittsburgh, PA, USA.

We encourage scholars and students who are based outside of North America to submit proposals. Please submit a 300-word proposal and a 200-word biographical statement with the subject line, “ChLA 2026 Global Panel Abstract” to Deirdre McMahon, dhm33@drexel.edu, by September 30, 2025, 11:59 p.m. (Eastern Standard Time).

One abstract will receive the Vivian Yenika-Agbaw Global Scholarship Grant towards conference expenses, and two other abstracts will receive travel grants to help to offset expenses related to the conference. Authors of proposals selected for the panel will be notified in advance of the submission deadline. The Global Committee encourages those scholars who are not selected for the “Borders, Bridges, Belonging: Neighborhoods” panel to submit an abstract through the general Call for Proposals so that international children’s literature will be featured in other panels at the conference. The deadline for general submission to the ChLA 2026 Annual Conference is October 15, 2025.

Click here for more information and updates about the ChLA 2026 Conference. For more information about the 2026 Global Committee, please visit our page and Global Committee Blog.