*CFP* “SOUTH AMERICAN CHILDHOODS IN THE DIGITAL ERA”, SPECIAL ISSUE, GLOBAL STUDIES OF CHILDHOOD

This special issue of Global Studies of Childhood focuses on South American Childhoods as they are impacted by the digital era. Attention has been paid towards the focus of children’s agency (Livingstone, 2015) and their interaction with technology in a highly networked era. Scholars of childhood in South America have taken to study the phenomenon of children living in a network society with great interest, juxtaposing different competing perspectives to understand the digital. This themed issue explores the space opened up by digital technologies in children’s lives, both on a daily basis as well as the longstanding relationship such technologies have with childhood. With that mind we aim for the interdisciplinary study of childhood, utilizing insights from fields from the Humanities and Human Computer Interaction and the Digital Humanities. 

Particularly, we are looking for articles in the intersection of digital technologies and childhood within a local, lived-in context in South America. As Fernando Zalamea and Rosa María Rodriguez Magda are fond of saying, South America is a truly transmodern geography, interspersed with different forms of life, experiences, and practices, especially in the lives of children, who have grown in the midst of the experience of digital technology.

We aim to solicit an interdisciplinary collection of articles produced from a range of fields that share a focus on studies of childhood from the global south, the impact of digital technologies in their lives, and the changing landscape of childhood in localized countries in South America. Digital technologies produce different epistemic and methodological challenges, from using the digital ethnography of Heather Horst and Sarah Pink, to grasping children’s individual agency as mapped out in the territory of contemporary capital. Operating within these questions is the aim of capturing children’s experiences with technology as detailed and holistically as possible and how to best do so. In South America, these questions grow more intense by the second, as different politico-economic regimes, class differences, and access to technology make for a wildly differentiated, and therefore contested, depiction of children’s lives.

By asking how South American children and digital technologies intersect, we seek articles that critically assess these questions as well as original, novel ways to register children’s agency in contemporary society. The editors encourage the submission of work that engages South American childhood and digital technology and its relation to race, class, gender, sexuality, intimacy, risks and harrasment.

Keywords and key topics

• South American Childhood
• Digital technologies
• Apps, phones, internet, forums, youtube, twitter
• Agency or lack thereof
• Coloniality and Imperialism
• Race, racism, and racialization
• Harassment and Risks with Digital Technologies.
• Schools, homes, bedrooms, kitchens, classrooms, and community centres

We welcome submissions adjacent to (but not limited to) the following questions:

What new epistemic, ontological, political, and societal frameworks arise out of the intersection of South American children and technology? What kind of insight and difference can be gained from South American children’s unique point of view and life experience?

How have digital technologies impacted children and their parents or people around them? How have they changed their political-economic relationships to objects, digital or not, and traditional conceptions of childhood?

How can digital technologies make explicit the coloniality or imperial residue of the countries that produced them and how is such coloniality impacting in children’s lives? In particular, how have digital technologies become ideological apparatuses affecting children’s imaginaries?

How have children adopted such technologies in their daily lives? Has technology created new practices? Is technology used differently than it was originally intended to be used?

Expressions of interest

Please email an abstract of 500-800 words (including key references) and a short bio of each author to guest editors by December 1st at southamericandigitalchildhood@gmail.com 

Timeline

November 2019 – call for papers

December 1 2019– abstract expression of interest due (250 words)

January 1 2020 – advice of acceptance due

April 15  2020 – submission due

June 15 2020 – feedback on first draft

September 15 2020 – final versions to editors

November 2020 – finalising all papers

January 2021 – table of contents, editorial and final papers to SAGE

March 2021 – Volume 11(1) published