Call for Book Chapters:
Dream-Chasers: Children and Success in Asia
This collection aims to explore how success is conceived for children across Asia. Economic development in the region is re-shaping the way success is understood for children. What does a “successful” child look like? How does childhood agency influence ideas about success? How is success for children represented in literature, cinema, and popular media? In what ways are these images grounded in the historical, political, cultural, theoretical, or philosophical contexts in which they are produced and consumed? While there have been numerous empirically-driven research into conceptualisations of success among young people, how success is defined for children in the texts they consume is an under-researched topic. We seek contributions that examine representations of success for children in Asia.
Possible areas of investigation may include, but are not limited to, the following:
- How does literacy / education relate to ideas about success for children?
- Morality and ethics
- Religion
- Gender and/or sexuality
- Race, ethnicity, and/or cultural difference
- Class
- Marginality and/or minority status
- Parental expectations vs children’s desires
- Juvenile delinquency
Please submit a
300 word abstract, current contact information along with a two-page CV as Word attachments to
Sue Chen and
Sin Wen Lau to
globalguai@gmail.com by
15 August 2020. Authors will be notified by
30 September 2020. The deadline for finished essays is
15 February 2021.
Dr Shih-Wen Sue Chen is Senior Lecturer in Writing and Literature at
Deakin University. She received her PhD in Literature, Screen and Theatre Studies from the
Australian National University. Her research focuses on British and Chinese children’s literature and culture from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. She is the author of
Children’s Literature and Transnational Knowledge in Modern China: Education, Religion, and Childhood (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) and
Representations of China in British Children’s Fiction, 1851-1911 (Routledge, 2013). Email:
sue.chen@deakin.edu.au.
Deadline for submissions: August 15, 2020
Contact email: globalguai@gmail.com
