Call for Abstract Proposals for a Special Issue on Queering Child and Youth Care

Child and Youth Care (CYC) operates with(in) social, historical, cultural, and politically situated
contexts, ideologies, and practices. Many of these have served children, youth, families and
communities very well; others have been harmful, destructive, and at times deadly. In this call
for articles queering CYC, we seek to reveal what is imbedded within CYC, and what CYC is
imbedded within, to understand how practitioners and scholars are oriented towards particular
ways of being—and away from others. We ask what might be possible if we survey the field
from a different orientation, contesting edges, questioning the normativity of our activities and
approaches, and asking what we desire?

A family of approaches to questioning and understanding working with children, youth,
families, and communities that has been underutilized in CYC includes queer theory, trans
analytics, queer crip theory, and the many perspectives of QTBIPOC including queer diasporas,
intersectionality, hybridity, and queer of color analyses. The International Journal of Child,
Youth and Family Studies invites submissions from people living, writing, working, or thinking
from these perspectives for a special issue on Queering Child and Youth Care.

The editors of this special issue understand the noun queer as a word with a frictive past, one
that has negatively affected many young people, an idea that has splintered (and created)
families, a political stance that has led to profound changes, and a theoretical orientation that is
legitimately critiqued. We also understand the verb queer as offering an opportunity to ask
what is child and youth care doing, thinking, enacting, resisting, embracing, desiring, and how
might considering our orientation(s) lead to generative, new ways of being in practice?

We invite interested writers, practitioners, researchers, and community members to submit an
abstract considering how they might queer child and youth care. Examples of topics may
include (but are certainly not limited to): Relevance of queer theory in CYC; queering CYC
practice/academia/literature/scholarship; racism and whiteness within lesbian, gay, bisexual,
and trans CYC practice; exploring homophobia, heterosexism, transphobia, and
homonormativity in CYC or in working with children and youth; sex, sexuality, sexual agency;
the erotics of child and youth care; queer practice/practicing queerness; research with
2SLGBTQQIA young people; the issue with “LGBTQ+ issues”; among others.

Interested authors are invited to submit a proposal with a title and an abstract of their paper.
The abstract should be no longer than 500 words and submitted by Tuesday, August 4, 2020.
The guest editors will review these abstracts and contact the authors of the proposals that best
fit the theme of the special issue inviting them to develop and submit a manuscript. Full papers
are due by Friday, October 30, 2020 and will be subject to a peer-review process. The
scheduled publishing date for the issue is in 2021.

Please send your abstract proposal and direct your questions to co-editors:
Audrey Wolfe: audreywolfe@uvic.ca
Mattie Walker: mattiew@uvic.ca
Sibylle Talmon-Gros Artz: sartz@uvic.ca
Wolfgang Vachon: wolfgang.vachon@humber.ca