Remembering Childhoods, Rewriting (Post)Socialist Lives

Abstract

The socialist modernization project envisioned childhood as a utopian ideal, and children as an embodiment of a new social order. However, living socialism often meant something quite different compared to its official interpretations on both sides of the Iron Curtain. We discuss the importance of exploring personal memories to gain a more complex understanding of childhood and the (post)socialist lived experience. Following the critique of the dominant narratives about childhood, we invite an epistemological, ontological, and methodological rethinking of assumptions about how we approach research. We highlight the diversity of the region’s histories, individual lived experiences, and the multiple ways of being a (post)socialist child. We close with an overview of the book and afterwords that connect the contributions to different disciplinary fields.