Overview
Following up on our last year’s meeting in Toronto, we would like to invite you to this year’s pre-conference workshop “Memories of (Post)Soviet / (Post)Socialist Schooling and Childhoods” that will take place on Sunday, March 8, 2:30-5:30 pm in Washington Hilton, Lobby Level, Kalorama.
This year’s workshop will bring together participants - individuals, scholars, educators, activists - who are interested in critically examining (post)socialist education and childhoods through collective biographies, autobiographies, and auto-ethnographies. The purpose of this workshop is two-fold. First, it aims to present current work in progress on this theme, including presentations and discussions of studies based on autoethnography, autobiography, and collective biography. Second, it aims to bring participants together to explore their potential interests in and ideas on writing their narratives of (post)Soviet/socialist schooling and childhoods for the purpose of publishing them as a part of an edited volume. The tentative program of the workshop includes the following activities (see abstracts of the presentations below):
1. .Sharing Works in Progress
“Across Three Continents: Reflections on Immigration, Education, and Personal Survival” by Katerina Bodovski
“Sweet and sour memories of the 1960s” by Lena Lenskaya
“Bows, uniforms and ties: Political subject formation and agency in childhoods under socialism” by Zsuzsa Millei, Iveta Silova, Nelli Piattoeva, Olena Aydarova, and Olena Fimyar
2. Identifying Directions for the Edited Volume on Soviet/socialist childhood memories
Idea Café - brainstorming areas of possibilities and interests, and identifying points of connection
Discussing potential themes, methodological paradigms, and trajectories for the edited volume, and register actual interests in contributing to the volume
The abstracts for the works in progress that will be shared during the workshop are listed below. We invite participants to reflect on their memories of (post)Soviet/(post)socialist schooling and childhood prior to the workshop to identify areas that have personal relevance for autoethnographic, autobiographic, or collective biographic exploration.
Workshop Summary
In convening this workshop, we believe that much of scholarly writing on (post)Soviet schooling and childhood has been predominantly produced by cultural outsiders - those who used exogeneous categories to narrate successes or failures of (post)Soviet institutions. The examination of childhood and schooling experiences from the insider positions has been rare, yet it holds great promise for making sense of (post)socialist transformations in the current neoliberal moment (Buyandelgeriyn, 2008). At the time when global educational policies based on Western designs become widely circulated around the globe, an analysis of (post)socialist experiences can be helpful for challenging the taken-for-granted assumptions and for providing spaces for imagining alternatives (Rogers, 2010; Silova, 2010; Millei & Griffith, 2011). To this end, this workshop is designed to bring together those who had first-hand experiences with (post)Soviet/(post)socialist schooling and childhood as cultural insiders to engage in remembering and (re)narrating their experiences.
This workshop creates a space for further collaboration, dialogue, and critical conversation to embark on projects of collective biography, autoethnography, autobiography, or oral history. The workshop will present some research that offers critical narratives and memory stories not typically acknowledged as objective truths (Davies & Gannon, 2006). Different research paradigms are used to interrogate the dominant discourses of schooling, constructions of childhoods in the narratives, as well as the subject positions made available in the stories in relation to socialist childhoods and institutions. Following research traditions that challenge the canons of positivism and empiricism, this kind of research aims to remove the distance between the researcher and the researched (Davies & Gannon, 2006; Ellis, 2004) and erase the boundaries between the personal and the political (Holman Jones, 2008).
As the continuation of last year’s popular workshop, this year’s work will be dedicated to explore potential themes and approaches in examining memories, narratives, and experiences of (post)Soviet or (post)socialist schooling and childhoods for the purpose of publishing them as an edited volume. More specifically, the purpose of this workshop is two-fold. First, it aims to present current work in progress on this theme, including presentations and discussions of studies based on autoethnography and collective biography. Second, it aims to bring participants together to explore their potential interests in and ideas on writing these narratives of (post)Soviet/socialist schooling and childhoods. The aim is to explore how childhood and schooling were constituted and experienced in (post)socialist contexts. Childhood as a socio-historical construct provides an analytical incision into the social issues and concerns regarding historical socialism, cultural/ideological changes, and subject formation. As Gonick & Gannon (2014, p.6) argue, “rather than truth of particular lives, … we are interested in using memory stories to examine the ways in which individuals are made social, how we are discursively, affectively, materially constituted in particular moments that are inherently unstable” and to open up ways to explore “how things come to matter in the ways they do” (Davies et al, 2013).
Collective dialogues and writing allow to explore affective attachments and assemblages that shape our understandings of (post)Soviet / socialist childhoods and schooling. In the workshop, the participants will examine - collectively and individually - their own experiences of Soviet/socialist schooling and childhoods by reflecting on lived experiences and memories. Reflecting on their experiences of Soviet/socialist schooling and childhoods - as experienced in different geographical locations - will enable participants to critically re-examine complexities inherent in (post)Soviet/socialist schooling and the making of Soviet/socialist child/student. This method will produce new understandings what Soviet/socialist childhoods mean as an individual and collective experience and as a historical and contemporary representation with significant implications for the global transformations in the current context of neoliberal globalization.
Abstracts
Across Three Continents: Reflections on Immigration, Education, and Personal Survival
Katerina Bodovski, Pennsylvania State University
Born in Soviet Moscow, Katerina Bodovski was twelve years old when Mikhail Gorbachev came to power, coming of age as the “perestroika” and “glasnost” movement gained full speed. She would later arrive in Israel during the peak of the peace process during which time Prime Minister Rabin was assassinated. Her final move to America, months after the upset of 9/11, would also directly and indirectly shape the way her personal journey unfolded. The unique feature of this work lies in the combination of autobiographical narrative and sociological analysis. By personalizing accounts of immigration, education, and family transformations, this book discusses the author’s firsthand experiences in Soviet Russia, Israel and the United States. The book speaks to scholars of education by providing examples and patterns in educational systems of the Soviet Union, Israel and the United States. Beyond academia, the book will resonate with immigrants who have experienced transitions between lands and languages. Furthermore, Dr. Bodovski utilizes her female perspective to illuminate different aspects of family life, immigration processes and finally, her experiences in United States academia as a doctoral student and a professor.
Sweet and sour memories of the 1960s
Lena Lenskaya, Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences
Early 60s have been the time of hope and enthusiasm. The country was beginning to open up, there was a big youth festival, the crisis in the Caribbean was over. Most families moved to flats of their own and the old slums were demolished. We, the children of the 1960s, were full of hope that we will live at the time of communism. And the rapid pace of space conquest seemed to be the evidence of that. However, the sinister shade of the former tyranny with its denunciations and repressions was still hanging over the country. In my presentation I will talk about two episodes of my school life: the day when Gagarin went into space and the scandalous evening of poetry with young poets from "The society of young geniuses".
Bows, uniforms and ties: Political subject formation and agency in childhoods under socialism
Zsuzsa Millei, Iveta Silova, Nelli Piattoeva, Olena Aydarova, and Olena Fimyar
Political socialization under socialism was distinct in two aspects. First, loyalty to the regime was imposed on children through particular organizations (including school organizations such as Pioniers), which were created and monitored by adults. Second, political socialization also exceeded civic education by a form of personal development that involved the mobilization of children’s active participation in political, ideological, and economic activities. It is often argued that children were politicized too early under socialist regimes which took away their childhood. In this article by using current scholarship on political socialization we complicate the notions of child politics under socialism. To do this, we reinsert memories generated in a collective biography project about our childhoods under socialism into their own historical contexts. The aim is to explore the micro-processes of everyday childhoods and subject formation, be that of mundane or ideological or else, to examine the ways in which we were made social under the socialist regimes in the countries of the former socialist bloc.
Workshop Conveners
Iveta Silova, Lehigh University
Olena Aydarova, Michigan State University
Nelli Piattoeva, University of Tampere
Zsuzsa Millei, the University of Newcastle
Olena Fimyar, University of Cambridge
