Archive CfP
Archive: Call for Papers Vol. 5 Issue 1 (2022)
CfP Correction / Extension of deadline: Dolls and puppet figures in narratives – historical and contemporary themes and motifs worldwide in literature, theater, film, media, folklore and popular cultures
The fifth CfP of the journal denkste: puppe / just a bit of: doll (de:do), a multidisciplinary journal for human-doll discourses, now has its own platform as an online journal. All information about the journal as well as all issues published so far are freely available and retrievable: https://dedo.ub.uni-siegen.de. Topic focus and deadlines for the fifth CfP will be specified on this occasion. In addition to the main topic, free scientific contributions as well as miscellaneous and other "smaller" presentation formats (e.g. interviews, reviews, essays, artistic work examples etc.) on human-doll aspects are welcomed and can be submitted at any time. All contributions go through an internal review process, and the scientific articles are additionally subject to an external peer review process.
The current thematic focus on dolls and puppet characters in narratives – historical and contemporary themes and motifs worldwide in literature, theater, film, media, folklore and popular cultures asks about – in the broadest sense – doll/puppet-related cultural historical roots, traditions and variants as well as current themes, narratives and motifs in literature, culture, media and everyday practices, regardless of age and/or particularities of the addressee groups. The call is "worldwide" (international) and historically oriented in order to trace the variety and complexity of narratives and motifs of dolls/puppets in literary and cultural fields of their reception and application. This includes the early beginnings of doll themes of various kinds in the history of mankind, together with their universally and/or culturally connoted traditions, folklores, traces and courses of development, as well as the current theme of artificial “doll”-humans in the various literary, theatrical, cultural, but also information-technological fields. Mutual intercultural reception and references, "translations", repercussions and "metamorphoses" of doll narratives are of interest in this context. Last but not least, the field of children's literature and culture is explicitly addressed here.
The call is thus addressed to a variety of disciplines in the Fine Arts, social sciences, and humanities in whose theoretical, research, and practical references doll-related narratives and themes are identifiable, whether they are explicitly formulated or subtly discernible in their meaning and effectiveness.
(Scientific) contributions may be approximately 30,000 characters. Other text formats should be shorter (5,000- 20,000 characters). The range of topics addressed results from the above considerations. The texts should be interdisciplinary understandable and can be submitted in German or English as an electronic file to the Editorial Team (Prof. Dr. Insa Fooken, fooken@psychologie.uni-siegen.de and/or Dr. Jana Mikota, mikota@germanistik.uni-siegen.de). We request outlines for a contribution (approx. 3,500 characters) and a short vita from now on until mid-January 2022. Responses to the request to submit a contribution will be made promptly. Final manuscripts should be received by May 15, 2022. The planned publication date is the end of 2022.
Archive: Call for Papers Vol. 4 Issue 1 (2021)
The fourth CfP of the journal denkste: puppe / just a bit of: doll (de:do), a multidisciplinary online journal for human-doll discourses (with peer review), focuses on the topic “Dolls /Puppets as Soulmates – the Meaning of One’s Own Doll(s)/Puppets in Biography and Artistic-Literary Work”. Regardless of this specific thematic focus scientific contributions as well as other text formats such as essays, interviews, reviews etc. on human-doll aspects related to the focus can also be submitted.
The first three issues of the journal deal with the topics “dolls in threat scenarios”, “dolls as miniatures” as well as the double issue “puppen/dolls like mensch – dolls/puppets as artificial beings”; they are available here.
With the focus on the meaning of one’s own doll(s)/puppet(s) in biography and artistic-literary work this call takes up a topic that has so far received little or only marginal attention from research: The role and function that (one’s own) dolls/puppets play in the lives of artists, and the influence of such dolls/puppets or doll-like, anthropomorphic beings on artistic and/or literary work. Thus, it is about the impact of early doll/puppet experiences on later creative processes as well as about the possible (biographical) roots and relations between doll motifs and doll narratives in artistic-literary work. Dolls/puppets are congenial, but ambiguous soul mates – ‘as if’ human and yet different. Their affordance as a transitional object in the course of life – as animation, symbolization and ‘dead’ materiality – contains a recurring fascination between newness (natality) and finitude (mortality). Dolls/puppets invite us to engage with ourselves and approach the world openly. People with an affinity for dolls react to this in mostly unique ways. All of this applies to own and/or self-created dolls/puppets well as to appropriated dolls and doll worlds, whether they are literary, graphic, cinematic, theatrical or material-technically processed (e.g. Pinocchio, Sandman, Babar, Barbie, the ‘Augsburg doll box’, Sesame Street). Even if dolls are symbolically charged with childhood – childhood experiences and childhood fictions – they go far beyond that. Transformed into the forms and contents of the later work aesthetics and artistic-literary practices, they stand for future and potentiality, for what was possible, is possible and/or would/(have been) possible. These approaches to the world can be destructive and abysmal, constructive and integrating, they can heal and save, but they can also remain indefinitely in the ambiguous and liminal limbo of the betwixt, between and beyond.
The call is aimed at a wide variety of disciplinary fields of theory, research and practical domains. It is about understanding the above-mentioned considerations as an echo of one’s own doll/puppet experiences and about shedding more light on their impact on literary, artistic-cultural, media, psychological-pedagogical as well as material-technical pieces of work. The following arbitrary listing indicates a diverse spectrum of possible “cases” and “doll traces” as examples. For the field of literature, the following are mentioned: Goethe, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Franz Kafka, Rainer Maria Rilke, Lou Andreas-Salomé, Bruno Schulz, Walter Benjamin, Alice Herdan-Zuckmayer, Kurt Tucholsky, Else Lasker-Schüler, Klaus Mann, Halldór Laxness, but also Yoko Tawada, Elena Ferrante and many more, not least in children’s and youth literature: Tonke Dragt owns doll’s houses, Tony Schumacher has created a wealth of doll illustrations, the contexts of the ‘Augsburg doll box’ (Augsburger Puppenkiste) ranges from Max Kruse to Thomas Hettche. From the field of art and media can be named: Niki de Saint Phalle, Oskar Kokoschka, James Ensor, Hans Bellmer, Morton Bartlett, Michel Nedjar, Gudrun Brüne, Cindy Sherman, Elena Dorfman, but also Marc Hogencamp with Marwencol. In Robert Zemecki’s films, dolls/puppets and dollified objects repeatedly appear, Marlene Dietrich had her dolls (almost) always with her, and the German cosmonaut Sigmund Jähn took the little sandman into space.
Archive: Call for Papers Vol. 3 Issue 1.1 and Issue 1.2 (2020)
With the focus on dolls/puppets as "artificial humans" we take up a subject that has concerned mankind since ancient times and has always upset their 'minds' and 'hearts'. In mythologies, literary fictions and narratives, in works of the visual arts, in film, in mechanical-technical utopias, in the performative arts, in pedagogy and the psychosocial fields of psychotherapy and counseling, and in all the fields of life in which curiosity, Imagination, imagination and resilience unfold, the motif of the doll and its inclusion raises fundamental existential questions: What is human? With the breathtaking development of computer science and robotics in the last decades and current research and applications in the field of artificial intelligence completely new answers to the age-old questions are sought and given on the one hand, which can also be integrated into the millennia-old tradition lines on the other hand and are continuously carried on.
At this point we find it appealing to use the rather old-fashioned idea of the 'doll' as a meta-frame for the different manifestations and phenomena of artificial humans: Children's play dolls, (figure-) theater puppets, automatons and machine men, animated lumps of clay, inflatable rubber dolls, homunculi, mandrakes, cyborgs, functional robots and socio-emotional assistants, androids, replicants, ventriloquists, and other dummies – all of them are dolls in a sense, whether they appear as literary narratives, fictitious figures, virtual assistants, or as materialized objects. With the creation of an image of themselves in form of dolls, human beings create relational and transitional spaces in which the most diverse potentials as well as abysses can unfold. In a very simple and yet highly condensed way, this process already takes place in the play of the child who – for the first time –creates a kind of human counterpart by 'dollifying' an object or who recognizes a doll as such. "Dolls/puppets like mensch" - the double sense of these words underlines the given ambiguity of the doll and the ambivalences that come with it.
The call addresses a wide variety of disciplines as far as theory, research and application is concerned. The aim is to highlight the idea of dolls/puppets as artificial humans in the multiplicity of its literary, artistic-cultural, material-technical, media, psychological-pedagogical variants and manifestations. Not only disciplines in the humanities and cultural disciplines should be addressed, but also the fields of design, technology, robotics and technology-human interactions. This is because the main focus of the topic addressed here is aimed at initiating new transdisciplinary discourses at the interfaces of diverse disciplines.
Archive: Call for Papers Vol. 2 Issue 1 (2019)
Dolls/Puppets as Miniatures – More than Small
The second issue of the journal is dedicated to the topic of Dolls / Puppets as Miniatures – More than Small. In this context, dolls/puppets and their environments (e.g. doll houses) are considered to be 'more' than just miniaturized variants and replicas of humans and the worlds they live in. They generate images and narratives that unfold their own magic and oscillate in function and effect: between exemplification, triviality, extraordinary, exclusivity, condensation, downsizing, baby schema (Kindchenschema), magical charge etc. The call is also about medial manifestations of the doll as miniature as from an etymological perspective image and writing are the inspiration for the birth of the miniature: the 'miniatura' was initially not about the ‘smaller scale of a larger', but about painting with vermilion (miniare), making the initials in manuscripts red in order to be able to replace them in the further processing by small pictures painted in the letters (see Kluge / Seebold).
If dolls/puppets are conceived as miniatures in this sense, mutual tensions come into play: between 'small' and 'large', 'visible' and 'hidden', 'mimetics' and 'poetics', 'real' and 'fictitious'. Dolls/puppets as miniatures are hybrid objects, charged with many kinds of symbolism and surplus of meaning representing a referential frame of the smallest in the smaller in the small or of the doll in the doll in the doll, respectively. At the same time miniatures and miniature worlds are also considered as a 'place to find greatness' (Bachelard), as in a burning glass they allow a view of the whole, of something profound beyond the surface and the recognition of inner contexts. This applies to miniatures and their narratives in many fields and disciplines – in literature, in the (fine) arts, in archeology, in photography, in film, in music, in figurative and object theater, in design and last but not least in the concrete replicas and 're-enactments’ of the real external worlds. Thus, it is also about the order of the small miniaturized things in the dolls’/puppets’ worlds, the large and small doll houses, the private altars, the personal object arrangements, the museum presentations, collections, toys, models of human-technology relationships etc. up to the doll house murders as illustrative material for crime scenes in forensic medicine and in court.
The call is aimed at a wide variety of disciplinary research and fields of practice. The aim is to highlight the idea of the doll/puppet as a miniature in the multitude of its medial and historical variants, to explore its status in current cultural and social discourses and to rediscover its promising potential.
Archive: Call for Papers Vol. 1 Issue 1 (2018)
Dolls in Times of Crises and Existential Threat (e.g., war/flight/violence/trauma)
The current CfP launches the publication of a multidisciplinary online-journal in the area of human-doll discourses (“just a bit of: doll”), a project in cooperation with the Forschungsstelle Schrift-Kultur (Research Center for Written Culture) at the University of Siegen. In addition to the areas of literature and literary studies, the journal addresses research from a wide spectrum of disciplines including psychology, education, visual and performing arts and the entire spectrum of cultural studies. It is a multidisciplinary online-journal with peer-review, welcoming contributions in both German and English. The two editors are supported by an interdisciplinary and international board of advisers. The journal is published biannually with both central topic areas (CfP) as well as a limited number of free contributions. Additional sections for miscellaneous contributions and other highlights such as interviews, artifacts, editorials etc. related to dolls and anthropomorphic artifacts are welcome independent of the topical CfP.
In times of crises and existential threat dolls and other (anthropomorphic) artifacts in all their forms can become particularly meaningful (transitional) objects offering both psychic security and attachment as well as the possibility for (inner) autonomy and the capacity to act. This not only applies to children, but generally for dolls as companions of humans. Evidence for such functions can be found in photographs, paintings, therapeutic settings, psycho-social contexts and, last but not least, literary representations. In Else Urys Nesthäkchen-series the favorite doll Gerda is a first victim of war and in her autobiographically-colored Rabbit trilogy Judith Kerr also mourns the loss of her beloved toy. Furthermore, we are also interested in questions such as: What significance do dolls have in times of current crisis and existential threat? Can Barbie dolls serve as meaningful objects of identification for refugee children? Can dolls have a cathartic function as objects of aggression? Can tension be relieved through doll play? Can puppet theater or human-puppet theater provide opportunities for new epistemological issues and insights into other, subtle views of threatening scenarios? These examples can be continued at will. In our assessment dolls, in their `ambivalent application ́ (Ariès), tend to be underestimated. Yet they embody highly innovative and creative application potentials in a wide range of research and areas of practice.
