‘That’s the way to do it!’: establishing the peculiar geographies of puppetry

Abstract

This paper initiates a new area of cultural geography – the geographies of puppets and puppetry – and makes both empirical and conceptual contributions by presenting an initial analysis of puppets in popular culture. The paper begins by highlighting the paucity of disciplinary interest in puppets and the productive potential of puppets and puppetry for a range of sub-disciplines within human geography. A content analysis of 50 films, television programmes and fictional texts is presented, through which a dimensional model of puppets in popular culture is developed to stimulate further work in this area. Utilitarian (role and extent), relational (individual and social) and qualitative (puppetness and ontology) dimensions describe the many and varied ways in which puppets are used in popular culture. The diverse spaces that are created in such works through the interrogation of the human-puppet relationship are explored, with more extreme interpretations of puppetness generating the most peculiar – unique and strange – geographies. Subsequently, the cultural analysis is related to conceptual developments from geographical work on comics and cartoons to advance a conceptual contribution. Integrating and inverting notions of borderscape and topological gulf accommodates the simultaneous maintenance and elimination of human-puppet distinctiveness found to be essential to the peculiar geographies of puppetry.

Worldless futures: On the allure of ‘worlds to come’

“…Nowhere is this maxim more certain than in the following phrases handpicked from within contemporary geographical scholarship. Cultural geographers speak of ‘openings to other worlds’ (Thrift, 2011, p. 21), ‘bringing worlds into being’ (Collard et al, 2015, p. 326), ‘producing [new] worlds’ (Oliver, 2020, p. 2), ‘worlds to emerge’ (Banfield, 2021, p. 152), and ‘enabling … new lived worlds’ (Gabrys & Yusoff, 2012, p. 17). Similarly, political geographers advocate ‘mak[ing] other worlds possible’ (Gibson‐Graham, 2008, p. 623), ‘enacting new worlds’ (Dawney et al, 2016, p. 22), ‘a world to come’ (Castree, 2014, p. 451), and ‘making new worlds rise’ (Blencowe, 2016, p. 200).…”

From drawings to puppet shows: practical ways in teaching vocabulary to primary school EFL learners

“…Children chose the space, as well as the components of disease management that were essential to them, and they felt more at peace (Suzan et al, 2020). Students are more responsive to learning when they are comfortable (Banfield, 2020;Puspitasari et al, 2019). Students are also exposed to authentic examples of the second language through puppet as presented in the following figure.…”