Mediating Media in a Digital Age
Volume 43: Issue 3 (Summer 2016)
Submissions due November 1, 2015
Today’s young adult readers access and generate young adult texts in myriad forms. Through multimedia platforms, television and film adaptations, fan fiction, and social media, they engage with stories in ways that extend beyond the originals. These opportunities for connection are rich in potential and complication. Do media enrich our interactions with others and our world—or is there a falseness in this seeming linkage? Consider the perspective of Rainbow Rowell’s narrator: “There are other people on the Internet. It’s awesome. You get all the benefits of ‘other people’ without the body odor and the eye contact” (Fangirl, p. 147). We wonder if all readers are inspired by techie texts or if some, in fact, imagine life as “an analog girl, living in a digital world” (Neil Gaiman, American Gods, p. 332).
For this issue, we encourage you to ponder and explore the ways in which you use young adult literature to help young people mediate media: How do you foster innovative engagement with media in your professional setting? What are the challenges of teaching and learning in the digital age, and how might they be mediated? How do digital communities invite and/or exclude young people today? What role does/can YA literature play in successfully navigating life in the “digital age”?
As always, we also welcome submissions focused on any aspect of young adult literature not directly connected to this theme. All submissions may be sent to prior to November 1, 2015. Please see the ALAN website (http://www.alan-ya.org/page/alan-review-author-guidelines) for submission guidelines.
Adolescence and Adolescents: Defining the Culture of Youth
Volume 43: Issue 2 (Winter 2016)
Submissions due July 1, 2015
How we conceive of adolescence influences our perception of adolescents. Through a biological lens, we might envision adolescence as an inevitable stage of life in which raging hormones determine behavior. Through a coming of age lens, adolescence might be defined by individual self-discovery and attainment of adult norms. Through a sociocultural lens, adolescence might be seen as a socially mediated practice created and shifted by societal expectations and influences. Taken together, these perspectives offer sophisticated and diverse means of defining the culture of youth.
In this issue, we invite you to consider how young adult titles (and those who write, teach, and promote them) might offer, challenge, confirm, or critique conceptions of adolescents or adolescence. How do authors present the young people they describe? How do readers respond to these representations? How do educators envision the young people in their care—and how does this vision influence how they care for them? How might stories help readers navigate adolescence (as defined through any lens) and work though the complexity expressed by David Levithan and John Green: “My face seems too square and my eyes too big, like I’m perpetually surprised, but there’s nothing wrong with me that I can fix” (Will Grayson, Will Grayson)?
