What makes an act defiant, resistant, or rebellious—and who gets to decide?

Children’s and young adult literature has long focused on characters who challenge, defy, and reimagine the worlds they inhabit and, eventually, inherit. Whether portraying a nonconforming child, an adolescent challenging authority, or collective uprisings, rebellion, and rebelliousness are central to how childhood is narrated and understood. At the same time, these texts often seek to contain or redirect rebellious impulses, presenting models of obedience and socialization that may oppose resistance. Moreover, these dynamics are not distributed evenly: the permission to rebel, the capacity for rebellion, and the interpretation and consequences of such acts are profoundly shaped by structures of power, including race, class, gender, sexuality, disability, and citizenship. 

Amid ongoing struggles over censorship, surveillance, migration, bodily autonomy,  and state and institutional violence worldwide, “Defiance, Resistance, Rebellion” calls for continued examination of how and why young people resist, and who can do so. Building on questions raised by ChLA in 2011 and 2015, this year’s theme explores disobedience, resistance, and rebellion amid intensified border regimes, displacement, militarization, colonial, state, and racial violence, and the policing of marginalized individuals. We invite submissions that move beyond U.S.-centric perspectives to consider how young people’s acts of resistance and rebellion emerge in diverse local, national, and transnational contexts, and how a virtual conference can foster new conversations.