In January 2025, just four days into the new Trump administration, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights announced that they had ended the so-called “Book Ban Hoax” by dismissing 11 pending civil rights complaints related to book bans in public schools and eliminating the position of Book Ban Coordinator – a position created by the Biden administration to address intellectual freedom violations in schools and federally-funded institutions. 

But book banning is not a hoax. It is all too real. The number of book bans and challenges in the United States has grown exponentially in the last five years, with the Office for Intellectual Freedom reporting a rise from 223 unique titles being challenged in 2020 to 4,240 in 2023 – an all-time high since the American Library Association (ALA) began tracking censorship twenty-five years ago (“Book Ban Data”).  This trend has continued, with preliminary data for the first 8 months of 2024 documenting challenges against 1,128 unique titles. These challenges disproportionately target minoritized communities, with books representing the voices and lived experiences of LGBTQIA+ and BIPOC individuals making up 47% of censorship attempts (“Censorship by the Numbers”). Alongside a change of scale, the scope and tactics of book challenges have also altered dramatically.  In addition to topics such as sex, religion and violence, those who challenge books are now expanding their efforts to include titles featuring death, grief, immigration and activism (“Cover to Cover”). Recent data also evidences a shift from individual complaints to a “well-organized, conservative political movement” spearheaded by organizations such as Moms for Liberty, No Left Turn in Education, and Citizens Defending Freedom, that target dozens or hundreds of titles at a time (“Censorship by the Numbers”). 

Though they may appear to be a recent phenomenon, book bans are nothing new. The censorship of young people’s reading material has an extensive history. From eighteenth-century anxieties about the effects of novel-reading on young ladies, to nineteenth-century concerns over the Penny Dreadful, to a mid-twentieth-century crackdown on comics, reading has long been considered dangerously immersive, seductive and morally degrading. Anxieties around access to reading material that is ‘appropriate’ for children persist, perpetuated by a conservative mobilisation of myths surrounding childhood ‘purity’ and ‘innocence’ – or what Lee Edelman terms the idealized, “sacred Child” (19). However, as Deborah Caldwell-Stone observes, censoring material on the basis of perceived obscenity, profanity or sexual content instead has the effect of banning books that matter to young people, that “speak to issues important to them” and deal with complex questions of identity, gender, sexuality, race and social justice (ix). 

For the online conference, contributions are invited from scholars at all career stages, from librarians and archivists, and from teachers at all levels, to consider book-banning and censorship of literature for young people, past and present. Participants might consider, but are not limited to, the following questions:

  • How might we theorize and continue to develop critical frameworks for understanding book banning and censorship within children’s literature and YA Studies?

  • How can we historicize and contextualize twenty-first century U.S. book-banning? What can we gain from transnational and/or transhistorical comparisons?

  • What can we learn from analyzing the methods, tactics and ‘reading’ strategies of those who challenge books? How can we resist and organize against book challenges, both in and outside the U.S. – and how should our own positionality inform our approach?

  • What are the politics of reading in a climate of censorship? How does reading and/or facilitating access to books (as teachers, librarians, booksellers) become an act of resistance?

  • The ‘child’ in whose name book bans are carried out is, as Edelman reminds us, still figured by the radical right as “the Child who might choose a provocative book from the shelves of the public library” – or the school classroom (19-21). Why do physical books remain the target of book bans, despite growing concerns over social media, the internet, and AI?

  • As a direct consequence of an increase in book challenges, soft censorship, where “books are purchased but placed in restricted areas, not used in library displays, or otherwise hidden or kept off limits due to fear of challenges” is also on the rise (“Book Ban Data”). How might librarians, educators, and practitioners navigate these challenges? 

  • As scandals and controversies continue to emerge within the literary world (for example: Sherman Alexie, J.K. Rowling, and Neil Gaiman), how do we navigate what Kenneth Kidd terms as “progressive censorship” (200) in our teaching and scholarship? 

  • What is the affective impact of book bans – rage, grief, sadness, fear, frustration? And how might we overcome, move through, or work with these responses as professional critics, librarians or teachers? 

  • How have publishers and booksellers resisted book banning (for example, the legal action taken by ‘The Big Five’)?

  • How is discourse around freedom, the First Amendment, and what it means to be American weaponized by those who seek to ban books?

  • How can we think about book-banning within the context of a wider political agenda that shuts down, censors, and silences by dismantling government departments, de-funding cultural institutions, and erasing information from official websites and documents?

Please submit proposals (250 words) for papers of approx. 20 minutes, along with a short biography (100 words) by 11.59pm AoE (Anywhere on Earth), 31 August 2025. Decisions will be communicated by 30 September 2025. Please contact the convenors with any questions.

Quellen:

“Book Ban Data,” American Library Association, https://www.ala.org/bbooks/book-ban-data. Accessed 31 March 2025.

Caldwell-Stone, Deborah. “Foreword.” Books Under Fire: A Hit List of Banned and Challenged Children’s Books by Pat. R. Scales, American Library Association, 2021, pp. ix-x

“Censorship by the Numbers,” American Library Association, https://www.ala.org/bbooks/censorship-numbers. Accessed 31 March 2025. 

“Cover to Cover: An Analysis of Titles Banned in the 23-24 School Year.” PEN America, https://pen.org/report/cover-to-cover/#heading-19. Accessed 31 March 2025. 

Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Duke University Press, 2004.

Kidd, Kenneth. “‘Not Censorship but Selection’: Censorship and/as Prizing.” Children’s Literature in Education, vol. 40, no. 3, Sept. 2009, pp. 197-216. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-008-9078-4

[Quelle: Pressemitteilung]