We will be presenting at the American Education Research Association (AERA) meeting in NYC on April 13-17, 2018. Please come and meet book editors, several contributors to the book, as well as other colleagues involved in this project! We will share the date, time, and place of our panel as soon as the conference schedule is confirmed.

Towards Decolonizing Childhood: Researching Memories of Everyday Life in (Post)Socialist, American Education Research Association (AERA), New York, NY, April 13-17, 2018

This session brings together theoretical and methodological insights from childhood studies, memory studies, and postcolonial studies to explore how adult generated memories may enable access to children’s lived experiences. Focusing on the memories of (post)socialist childhood in contexts ranging from Central Europe to Asia, the contributors (re)narrate their past lived experiences through autobiographic, autoethnographic, and collective biography research. They explore how children conceive the world on their own terms and as social actors, illuminating the diverse spaces of childhoods interweaving with broader political, economic, and social life. They challenge what is considered “normal” and “natural” in the historical accounts of socialist childhoods and (re)write histories that rub against traditional imaginaries of Cold War divisions between East/West.

Chairs: Iveta Silova, Arizona State University and Nelli Piattoeva, University of Tempere

Erasure and Renewal in (Post)Socialist China: My Mother’s Long Journey
Jinting Wu, University at Buffalo – SUNY

Uncle Ho’s Good Children Award and State Power at a Socialist School in Vietnam
Violette Hoang-Phuong Ho

Towards Decolonizing Childhood and Knowledge Production
Iveta Silova, Arizona State University ; Nelli Piattoeva & Zsuzsa Millei, University of Tampere

Discussants: Susanne Marie Gannon, Western Sydney University andMarek Tesar, The University of Auckland