Call for Papers 2/2026

In every age and in every part of the world, childhood has been an object of repression, a terrain for the exercise of power and domination, a target of cultural or ethnic erasure and, for the most varied reasons, a pawn in the pursuit of revenge or compensation – not only in wartime or under authoritarian regimes, but also in periods regarded as democratic. Precisely because children embody the future of a family, a community or a nation, they have often stood at the centre of political, ideological and religious projects that have turned them into instruments, taken from their parents to be re-educated, placed with families deemed more suitable, cut off from their own language and culture, enlisted, deported or swept up in the conflicts of adults. Alongside the overt violence of war and persecution, less visible administrative practices have produced, in the name of protection, irreversible separations and broken genealogies. Not all separations, however, were imposed from outside. At times it was families themselves who sent their children away, entrusting them to strangers, organisations or institutions to shield them from war, hunger or persecution, in the faint hope of an eventual reunion. These choices, too, though dictated by necessity, left deep wounds that long remained unspoken. Silence is, indeed, one of the most recurrent forms of childhood trauma: imposed by those who inflicted the violence, reinforced by institutional forgetting, yet at times guarded by the victims themselves as a form of protection.

This issue of DIVE-IN sets out to explore the ways in which literature, broadly understood, works through and represents these wounds (from fiction to poetry, from theatre to life writing, from children’s literature to the graphic novel). Writing can bring to light neglected, silenced or censored areas of experience and restore a voice to those who, because of their age or circumstances, were unable to bear witness. At the same time, it transmits memory, forging a bond between the generations who suffered the violence and those who inherit their silence, their questions and the need to investigate. Of particular interest are the narrative – and not only narrative – strategies through which texts confront the difficulty of recounting an experience lived through before one had the means to understand and name it: the child’s gaze and the adult’s reworking of it, the tension between document and fiction, fragmentation, reticence and recourse to the imaginary. The call is open to all linguistic and cultural areas and to all historical periods.

Editors invite submissions in the following (though not exclusive) areas of analysis:

Childhood as an Object of Repression

· Institutional violence against children in authoritarian or democratic contexts

· Childhood trauma as the ‘collateral damage’ of wars and conflicts

· Denied, forgotten and sacrificed childhoods

Separations and Appropriations

· The forcible expropriation of children

· Children sent away by their own families in times of conflict

· Separation for purposes of re-education, discrimination or assimilation

· Erased and rewritten identities; the search for origins

Bodies and Memories

· Forms of reparation promoted by institutions, associations and individual citizens

· Testimony and the legacy of trauma

· The body as memory and the possibilities of healing

Theories and Forms

· Literary strategies for representing childhood trauma

· The voices of children and adolescents

· Analyses of specific texts or cases

· Countries, languages, periods

Deadlines and Timeline

· Deadline for abstract submission (500 words): 18 November 2026 · Abstracts should be sent to luigi.contadini@unibo.it and rivistadivein@unibo.it with ‘DIVE-IN Proposal 2/2026’ as the subject line

· Notification of acceptance or rejection: by 5 December 2026

· Deadline for submission of the full article: 18 February 2027

Languages: Italian, English

Further info: rivistadivein@unibo.it