Being of the World. Locating Childhood

We invite submissions for Issue 8 of “Paidia i Literatura”, entitled Being of the World. Locating Childhood.

Children’s and young adult literature plays a key role in shaping the spaces, places, and landscapes in which adventures unfold, and where educational processes and social experiences take root. Landscape, locality, and the communal experience of place become carriers of narrative, education, and identity formation.

The aim of the upcoming issue of “Paidia i Literatura” is to reflect on how children’s and young adult literature, pedagogy, and education foreground space and place, and what meanings they attribute to them.

We welcome theoretical and empirical articles, including literary studies, critical discussions of place-based educational projects, and analyses of interdisciplinary (including humanities-oriented) outdoor practices addressing the following topics:

• Landscape in literature for young readers,
• Pastoral / degraded landscapes of childhood in children’s and young adult literature,
• Urban and rural spaces of childhood in literature and other cultural texts addressed to young audiences,
• Literature in the context of playing with space and place (e.g., adventure novels, fantasy literature),
• Reportage and non-fiction for young readers,
• Relationships with place in children’s and young adult literature,
• Community and intergenerational narratives of place in literature for young readers,
• Local narratives (local heroes) in children’s and young adult literature,
• The language of place and about place in children’s and young adult literature,
• Memory of place and local memory in shaping the postmemory of the younger generation,
• Environmental memory in literature for young readers,
• The topos of place in narratives of childhood addressed to adult readers (fiction and non-fiction),
• Pedagogy of place,
• Place-Based Learning as building relationships with place,
• Outdoor education – critical discussion of good practices,
• Contact with place as a response to “nature-deficit disorder” – literary, pedagogical, and educational perspectives,
• New reading practices – reading in place, about place, and for place,
• Children’s spatial imagination and the construction of fictional worlds.

We particularly welcome the following approaches: literary analyses of selected texts or genres; articles combining literary theory with educational practice; case studies of literature-inspired place-based education projects; and critical essays on the role of space and place in children’s and young adult literature, pedagogy and education.

The list of proposed topics remains open to alternative approaches related to the thematic scope of the issue. We also remind contributors about the ongoing call for papers for the Varia section.

The submission deadline is 30 April 2026.

The Editorial Team
“Paidia i Literatura”