Aiming to move away from singular history writing toward multiple histories, this book brought together a group of scholars to (re)narrate histories in ways that would lead to more complex understandings of the (post)socialist pasts, presents, and futures. Committed to this outlook, we invited colleagues from different disciplines to engage with our volume in a series of afterwords rather than having one last word or single voice close the book. These authors speak from multiple perspectives, including different disciplinary and methodological backgrounds, as well as various levels of personal connections to (post)socialist histories and contexts. They discuss contributions and implications of our work for different fields, including international relations, comparative education, childhood studies, collective biography research, and decolonial studies. This ensemble of comments, reflections, and critiques offers different ways for readers to connect with our work and also points out new perspectives, complexities, and directions for future research. Together they inspire ample thoughts for what could follow afterward.

Examining our own pasts, and particularly childhoods, is not an easy task. For academics, to conduct a substantial reflection and analysis of the ideologies and complexities of their own childhoods, should perhaps come more easily because of our training and the nature of our profession—to think, speak, read, and write. However, perhaps this is not true at all—perhaps it is much harder to bare ourselves in front of our academic colleagues and friends, in a competitive, and sometimes very judgmental, environment. Writing ourselves is a brave step that leaves an articulated part of ourselves on paper, on a screen, in a certain sense and form, ‘forever.’ We cannot reclaim our private narrative once it has been published. It does not belong just to us anymore. Rereading in print what we once wrote about our own childhoods is a very bold, very courageous exercise, one that can leave a mark on our minds and bodies, perhaps in the same way as these narratives from bygone times once did, as our very own ‘lived experiences .’

There is nothing equivocal in writing ourselves into our research and outputs. Perhaps ‘now’ we do live in times when scholars have carved out spaces where memory -infused data are accepted and welcomed, where voices and experiences of ourselves are data that are considered in some communities as both important and rigorous. These narratives of academics who grew up in so-called socialism were once marginalized voices that are now elevated to the public discourse. The data—the experiences, the recollections, the remembrances, the dreams of bygone times—once disclosed in public, in a sense smooth the rough edges for ourselves and others, as they are interpreted and theorized. In the end, what we are left with, are carefully edited powerful memories of everyday children’s lived experiences and of ideologically driven childhoods. In recent years, multiple theorizations of these (childhood) (post)socialist experiences have been narrated and published (see, for instance, Arndt & Tesar, 2014; Aydarova, Millei, Piattoeva, & Silova, 2016; Silova, Aydarova, Millei, & Piattoeva, 2016; Tesar, 2013).

For those of us who grew up in, and under, a very loose umbrella of ‘socialism,’ this is not an easy task. In my own experience of and research on childhoods under this particular ideological governance, which differ from other ideologically influenced childhoods, children have experienced abuse, abandonment, pain, laughter, beloved memories, and exciting subcultures (or as I referred to in my prior work, a childhood underground). There is nothing simple about these childhoods. And I purposefully use the term ‘childhoods’—as there is no singularity in any of these experiences of children and youth growing up under ‘socialism’. Always plural. Always childhoods. While the reader exploring this book may disagree with the narratives in some chapters, argue against, or for, different experiences of their own memory with respect to those presented here, it is certainly not possible to justify a generalization of one socialist childhood. As I’ve been arguing for the past ten years, when it comes to socialist narratives, we need to use the term ‘childhoods’ to emphasize the plurality and multiplicity of all narratives and experiences, feelings, and subjectivities that have been experienced and performed under this ideological governance (Tesar, 2014). Certainly, arguing against personal experiences, narratives, and truths is futile and dangerous; and it is time to accept the multiplicity of childhoods in socialism without needing to define ‘one socialist paradigm of childhood’.

In this book, the editors have started a very brave project. From a methodological perspective, we do not often come across an edited collection where academics challenge themselves on a personal level, rediscover their roots, and attempt to theorize their early experiences. The chapters in this book reminded me of power and power relations, the power of ideology , the power of adult and child subjects, and the power of governance. I appreciate that some narratives appeal to the reader’s emotions rather than to a mechanical theorization. The academics’ ability to analyze themselves and explore their ontological becomings, once shared with an audience, allows readers to see glimpses of adult and children subjects-in-the-making through these narratives. Readers come to see the vulnerability and diverse notions of vibrant life under the calm, and on-the-surface prescriptive, shell of socialism. This book is a courageous project and process of writing and editing.

Memories form an archive. They form an archive into which we, human subjects, allow ourselves to reach and to share and interpret data. What are these memories in our mind, this archive that we are willing to access and share? Where is the truth in such an examination, and where do we find ourselves in this process? What ethics are involved in such an examination when we mention people, places, and things of bygone times? For me, my first memories of socialism will always be linked with inequality, grey color, uniformity, a border line life with barbed wire, and exciting subcultures focused on something forbidden; while at the same time these memories are linked to narratives of something exciting, amazing, of family time, beloved white winters in the mountains, summers going on forever, with green fields and peer-infused play, adventures, and exploring possibilities of a childhood underground, challenging the ideological governance of the system, as well as challenging the power structure of adults (and these two concerns were very much connected). Spending time at cottages with families and friends evokes nostalgia, memories, a rethinking of the past. They smooth the rough edges in the archive of my mind. Similarly, utilizing ‘jokes’ to deal with difficult positionings of children in society, then and now alike, has this effect. Dealing with the desires and envy of Western childhoods, commodities, and toys, or fear, these memories iron out the argument that all is gone and forgotten. In my memory , there is always both excitement and fear when it comes to remembering childhoods. And the methodology of writing myself into the narrative after all these years somehow perhaps makes it okay and somewhat good.

How do we process ethical concerns when exploring the archives of ourselves? They present a complex ontology of ourselves. It is more than just ‘introspection,’ more than pure accessing and retrieving of memories of childhoods. And this is more than just an individual concern. There is something collective and shared, not in the sense of shared similarities, but in the sense of embracing differences of otherness and accounts of possibilities of our memories. Theorizing the archive can be powerful, but sometimes it is equally powerful to reduce our adult academic voice and let ‘childhood data’ speak for themselves. However, I argue, there is a need not to forget considering the ethics of such data, findings, stories, and narratives: there are ethics involved in memory -infused work, there is a truth (in both a structural and post-structural sense), and power relations are very much present in the work on socialist childhoods (Tesar, 2015). One of the ways I came to explore these narratives, archives, and ontologies of ourselves is by utilizing philosophy as a method, which is, in a nutshell, about an ethical relationship with thought (Koro-Ljungberg, Carlson, Tesar, & Anderson 2015).

Finally, why are socialist childhoods important? Why now, if ever, do we see academics writing about them? I have argued before that socialist childhoods allow us to see the logic of neoliberal childhoods (Tesar, 2014). Socialist childhoods need constant rethinking, reinvention, to burst the myth of a singularity of socialist childhoods, to see the productive otherness , to see ourselves, those who grew up under socialism, as those who are able to both witness and testify to the diversity and complexity of associated experiences of childhoods. There is not one socialist childhood, but many, entangled and embedded in complex ideological becomings. There is nothing ‘purely wrong’ with socialist childhoods, as this book demonstrates, but there is also nothing ‘purely good’ with them either. All that we as readers are left with is a productive mundane everyday in-betweenness.