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.
eBook - ePub
Childhood and Schooling in (Post)Socialist Societies
Memories of Everyday Life
Iveta Silova, Nelli Piattoeva, Zsuzsa Millei, Iveta Silova, Nelli Piattoeva, Zsuzsa Millei
This is a test
Share book
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub
Childhood and Schooling in (Post)Socialist Societies
Memories of Everyday Life
Iveta Silova, Nelli Piattoeva, Zsuzsa Millei, Iveta Silova, Nelli Piattoeva, Zsuzsa Millei
Book details
Book preview
Table of contents
Citations
About This Book
This book explores childhood and schooling in late socialist societies by bringing into dialogue public narratives and personal memories that move beyond imaginaries of Cold War divisions between the East and West. Written by cultural insiders who were brought up and educated on the eastern side of the Iron Curtain - spanning from Central Europe to mainland Asia - the book offers insights into the diverse spaces of socialist childhoods interweaving with broader political, economic, and social life. These evocative memories explore the experiences of children in navigating state expectations to embody "model socialist citizens" and their mixed feelings of attachment, optimism, dullness, and alienation associated with participation in "building" socialist futures. Drawing on the research traditions of autobiography, autoethnography, and collective biography, the authors challenge what is often considered 'normal' and 'natural' in the historical accounts of socialist childhoods, and engage in (re)writing histories that open space for new knowledges and vast webs of interconnections to emerge. This book will be compelling reading for students and researchers working in education, sociology and history, particularly those within the interdisciplinary fields of childhood and area studies.
'The authors of this beautiful book are professional academics and intellectuals who grew up in different socialist countries. Exploring "socialist childhoods" in myriad ways, they draw on memories, and collective history, emotional insider knowledge and the measured perspective of an analyst. What emerges is life that was caught between real optimism and dullness, ethical commitments and ideological absurdities, selfless devotion to children and their treatment as a political resource. Such attention to detail and examination of the paradoxical nature of this time makes this collective effort not only timely but remarkably genuine.'
âAlexei Yurchak, University of California, USA
Frequently asked questions
How do I cancel my subscription?
Can/how do I download books?
At the moment all of our mobile-responsive ePub books are available to download via the app. Most of our PDFs are also available to download and we're working on making the final remaining ones downloadable now. Learn more here.
What is the difference between the pricing plans?
Both plans give you full access to the library and all of Perlegoâs features. The only differences are the price and subscription period: With the annual plan youâll save around 30% compared to 12 months on the monthly plan.
What is Perlego?
We are an online textbook subscription service, where you can get access to an entire online library for less than the price of a single book per month. With over 1 million books across 1000+ topics, weâve got you covered! Learn more here.
Do you support text-to-speech?
Look out for the read-aloud symbol on your next book to see if you can listen to it. The read-aloud tool reads text aloud for you, highlighting the text as it is being read. You can pause it, speed it up and slow it down. Learn more here.
Is Childhood and Schooling in (Post)Socialist Societies an online PDF/ePUB?
Yes, you can access Childhood and Schooling in (Post)Socialist Societies by Iveta Silova, Nelli Piattoeva, Zsuzsa Millei, Iveta Silova, Nelli Piattoeva, Zsuzsa Millei in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Didattica & Politiche educative. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
Information
Topic
DidatticaSubtopic
Politiche educativeAfterwords
© The Author(s) 2018
Iveta Silova, Nelli Piattoeva and Zsuzsa Millei (eds.)Childhood and Schooling in (Post)Socialist Societieshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62791-5_13Preface to Afterwords
Iveta Silova1 , Zsuzsa Millei2 and Nelli Piattoeva3
(1)
Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA
(2)
Institute for Advanced Social Research, University of Tampere, Tampere, Finland
(3)
Faculty of Education, University of Tampere, Tampere, Finland
Iveta Silova
is a professor and director of the Center for the Advanced Study in Global Education at Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College in Arizona State University. Her research focuses on the study of globalization and knowledge transfer, and the intersections of postsocialist, postcolonial, and decolonial perspectives in education.
Zsuzsa Millei
is a senior research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Social Research, University of Tampere, Finland. Her research explores preschool as a political space and childhood as a political form of being. Her current projects involve everyday nationalism and childhood, and (post)socialist childhoods from a decolonial perspective.
Nelli Piattoeva
is a senior lecturer at the Faculty of Education, University of Tampere, Finland. She is interested in the post-Soviet audit culture and its effects on schools, as well as the production of numerical data on education and the political work done with numbers.
© The Author(s) 2018
Iveta Silova, Nelli Piattoeva and Zsuzsa Millei (eds.)Childhood and Schooling in (Post)Socialist Societieshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62791-5_14Narratives from Bygone Times: Toward a Multiplicity of Socialist Childhoods
Marek Tesar1
(1)
Faculty of Education and Social Work, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand
Marek Tesar
grew up in a communist Czechoslovakia. A former teacher, he is currently a senior lecturer in Childhood Studies and Early Childhood Education (ECE) at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. He is Editor-in-Chief of Policy Futures in Education (SAGE), and his research focus is on childhood, philosophy of education, policy, and methodology. His scholarship and activism merges theoretical work with the practical exploration of the mundane lives of children in Aotearoa, New Zealand, and overseas.
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 professionâto think, speak, read, and write. However, perhaps this is not true at allâperhaps 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, âforever.â 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 âlived experiences .â
There is nothing equivocal in writing ourselves into our research and outputs. Perhaps ânowâ 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 dataâthe experiences, the recollections, the remembrances, the dreams of bygone timesâonce 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 childrenâs 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 âsocialism,â 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 âchildhoodsââas there is no singularity in any of these experiences of children and youth growing up under âsocialismâ. 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 Iâve been arguing for the past ten years, when it comes to socialist narratives, we need to use the term âchildhoodsâ 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 âone socialist paradigm of childhoodâ.
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 readerâs emotions rather than to a mechanical theorization. The academicsâ 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 âjokesâ 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 âintrospection,â 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 âchildhood dataâ 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 âpurely wrongâ with socialist childhoods, as this book demonstrates, but there is also nothing âpurely goodâ with them either. All that we as readers are left with is a productive mundane everyday in-betweenness.
References
Arndt, S., & Tesar, M. (2014). Crossing borders and borderlands: Childhoodâs secret undergrounds. In S. Spyrou & M. Christou (Eds.), Children and borders (pp. 200â213). London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.
Aydarova, E., Millei, Z., Piattoeva, N., & Silova, I. (2016). Revisiting pasts, reimagining futures: Memories of (post)socialist childhood and schooling. European Education, 48(3), 159â169.Crossref
Koro-Ljungberg, M., Carlson, D., Tesar, M., & Anderson, K. (2015). Methodology brut: Philosophy, ecstatic thinking, and some other (unfinished) things. Qualitative Inquiry, 21(7), 612â619.Crossref
Silova, I., Aydarova, E., Millei, Z., & Piattoeva, N. (2016). Revisiting pasts, reimagining futures: Memories of (post)socialist childhood and schooling. Special Issue in European Education, 48(3), 159â169.
Tesar, M. (2013). Socialist memoirs: The production of political childhood subjectivities. Globalisation, Societies and Education, 11(2), 223â238.Crossref
Tesar, M. (2014). My feelings: Power, politics and childhood subjectivities. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 46(8), 860â872.Crossref
Tesar, M. (2015). Ethics and truth in archival research. History of Education, 44(1), 101â114.Crossref
© The Author(s) 2018
Iveta Silova, Nelli Piattoeva and Zsuzsa Millei (eds.)Childhood and Schooling in (Post)Socialist Societieshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62791-5_15The Worlds of Childhood Memory
Robert Imre1
(1)
IASR, University of Tampere, Tampere, Finland...