coldwarchildhoods

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Remembering Childhoods Across Time and Space: Reflections from Collective Memory Workshops Part 1.

“I was very, very inspired. I loved to see how the memories speak to other memories and things suddenly get a wider meaning and context. I hope that the workshop was only the beginning of our collective memory work.”
Quote from memory workshop participant

The fall of 2019 was a really busy time for us! In September and October, we brought together the participants of the Reconnect/Recollect project to participate in the memory workshops, which took place in three locations in Europe (Berlin, Riga, and Helsinki) and in Latin America (Mexico City). Thank you all who joined the workshops, shared memories, and worked with us!

Iveta and Nelli talking on FreshEd podcast

FreshEd is a weekly podcast that makes complex ideas in educational research easily understood. Iveta and Nelli discussed there our book – Childhood and Schooling in (Post)Socialist Societies – and the research that we are now undertaking, continuing the book. They explored questions like “What was it like growing up and attending school in the Soviet Union and other socialist societies? Did the lived experiences of children match the official rhetoric of the state or the Western bloc? What agency did children have?”

Have a listen here!

Quoted in Time magazine about our research on hair bows and socialist childhoods!

“From Marie Antoinette to JoJo Siwa, Hair Bows Have a Surprisingly Meaningful History” by Anna Purna Kambhampaty

Kylmä sota ei vienyt lämpöä lapsuusmuistoista

Check out an article in Finnish by Tiina Lankinen on our ongoing project Re-Connect / Re-Collect: Crossing the Divides through Memories of Cold War Childhoods.

The Berlin Wall and girls’ bows: Re-appraising histories of socialism through childhood memories

Check out a piece we wrote on Alusta! – an e-publication by The Faculty of Social Sciences at Tampere University.

Socialist childhood exhibition opening in Lenin Museum, Tampere, Finland

This year marks the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Cold War ended two years later in the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Although from this perspective, socialist societies have been gone for a while, there are people living among us – including here in Finland – whose important years of life have been spent in socialist societies in the Soviet Union, Southeast Asia, Latin America, China, Central and Eastern Europe. Many Finnish people have also lived some sort of a socialist childhood, as the Finnish author Laura Honkasalo described in her book “Your children are not yours”.