{"id":195,"date":"2026-10-07T09:44:22","date_gmt":"2026-10-07T09:44:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ieas-szeged.hu\/childlit\/?page_id=195"},"modified":"2026-10-08T16:26:31","modified_gmt":"2026-10-08T16:26:31","slug":"call-for-papers","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/ieas-szeged.hu\/childlit\/cbc2027\/call-for-papers\/","title":{"rendered":"Call for Papers: The 21st Child and the Book Conference"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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The Politics and Poetics of Friendship:<\/strong> The Ethics of Storytelling and Companionship<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

University of Szeged, Hungary<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

May 21-23, 2027<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

The 2027 edition of The Child and the Book<\/em> conference invites participants to return to enduring human values in times of crisis while critically reexamining concepts too often taken for granted. Friendship and storytelling are fundamental to human experience, yet both raise complex ethical, philosophical and political questions that deserve renewed scholarly attention.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The conference aims to approach friendship not only as a recurring theme in children\u2019s and young adult literature, media, and culture, but also as an ethical model through which storytelling practices may be reconsidered. Storytelling is fundamentally relational, emerging through acts of listening, trust, curiosity, reciprocity, and imaginative co-presence that connect tellers and listeners, adults and children, readers and characters, humans and non-humans. It may constitute a form of knowing with<\/em> rather than knowing about<\/em> another, challenging conventional hierarchies between knower and known and generating situated, embodied, relational forms of knowledge. Stories may create possibilities for companionship and recognition, allowing us to encounter forms of otherness that might otherwise remain inaccessible, and gain a better understanding of ourselves through the other. Yet neither friendship nor storytelling should be idealized as inherently benevolent or harmonious practices. Both may involve asymmetries of power, emotional dependency, exclusion, betrayal, miscomprehension, or the difficult negotiation of differences. Friendship can function simultaneously as intimacy and burden, care and control, solidarity and vulnerability: we can be making friends and breaking friends. Marked by ambiguities, friendship is a form of love (Kracauer), yet we may find it difficult to verbalise what exactly we find loveable in our friends; it is a learnt empathic engagement (Garc\u00eda-Gonz\u00e1lez) grounded in mutual goodwill (philia<\/em>), but its affective partiality conflicts the universalism of moral principles; it deepens self-knowledge, but by continually shaping one another, we also come to realize the fluidity, fragmentation, and plurality of the subject-in-process. Similarly, storytelling may create connection but may also expose, manipulate, alienate, discipline, or silence. The ethics of storytelling therefore concerns not only what stories communicate, but how narrative practices establish, sustain, challenge, or fracture relations between subjects. Children\u2019s literature particularly foregrounds these tensions, as stories become sites where companionship, authority, agency, conflict, and responsibility are negotiated, where moral dilemmas are enacted, and where \u201ethe ethical encounter with the Other\u201d may take place in Levinas\u2019s sense. Such encounters may give rise to a \u201etransformative ethics of joy\u201d (Deleuze, Braidotti), an \u201eethics of wonder\u201d (LaCaze), an \u201eunconditional hospitality\u201d and a \u201epolitics of radical kindness\u201d (Derrida) but they may also reveal a crisis of care, a \u201cpolitics of uncertainty\u201d (Scoones and Stirling), or what Nussbaum calls \u201cthe fragility of goodness.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We therefore invite contributions that explore friendship as a narrative motif, an epistemic medium, a structural principle, and a complex ethical lens through which storytelling practices can be critically examined. We look forward to conversations that rethink how children\u2019s literature and culture imagine friendship\u2014what stories friendship generates, and how storytelling itself might be understood as an act of friendship, \u201ca way of life, capable of yielding a culture and an ethics.\u201d (Foucault)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We invite submissions either in the form of individual papers<\/strong>, or panels<\/strong> that explore literary works across cultures, historical periods, and genres, examining the relationship between friendship and storytelling: friendship as storytelling, and storytelling as friendship.<\/strong> In line with the long-standing tradition of The Child and the Book<\/em>, the conference aims to provide a forum for critical dialogue across disciplines, traditions, and methodologies. We particularly welcome theoretically grounded approaches that investigate the ethical, political, poetical, pedagogical, psychological, and affective dimensions of our interconnected key concepts. From multidisciplinary perspectives we seek to explore how friendship and storytelling can contribute to rethinking literary and cultural relations, as well as our understanding of childhood. The conference will be held in person<\/strong>, and can accommodate max. 100 papers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Possible topics include, but are not limited to:<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n