Thinking through memories of childhood in (post)socialist spaces : ordinary lives in extraordinary times

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=cchg20 Children's Geographies ISSN: 1473-3285 (Print) 1473-3277 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cchg20 Thinking through memories of childhood in (post)socialist spaces: ordinary lives in extraordinary times Zsuzsa Millei, Iveta Silova & Susanne Gannon To cite this article: Zsuzsa Millei, Iveta Silova & Susanne Gannon (2019): Thinking through memories of childhood in (post)socialist spaces: ordinary lives in extraordinary times, Children's Geographies, DOI: 10.1080/14733285.2019.1648759 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14733285.2019.1648759 © 2019 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group Published online: 01 Aug 2019. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 462 View related articles View Crossmark data Thinking through memories of childhood in (post)socialist spaces: ordinary lives in extraordinary times Zsuzsa Millei a , Iveta Silova b and Susanne Gannon c a Faculty of Education and Culture, University of Tampere, Tampere, Finland; b Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College, Center for Advanced Studies in Global Education, Arizona State University, Phoenix, USA; c Adult and Postgraduate Education, Western Sydney University, Sydney, Australia ABSTRACT In the history of modernity, childhood represents societies’hopes and desires for the future. An offspring of modernity, the socialist project had a unique preoccupation with children and childhood for the social (re)making of societies. However, research on both sides of the Iron Curtain has explored children’s lives in socialist societies by focusing on the organised efforts of state socialisation, largely overlooking how childhoods were actually experienced. In this article, first, we delve into the utility of memory stories for exploring childhoods and children’s everyday lives in a variety of socialist spaces. Second, we explicate how memory stories about everyday life can serve as data for culturalpolitical analysis. We aim to show how ‘thinking through’memory stories enables us to learn about childhood and children’s lives and to gain access to historical socio-political discourses and practices. We conclude with the relevance of our discussion for engagements with current global problems. ARTICLE HISTORY Received 15 August 2018 Accepted 16 July 2019 KEYWORDS Memory stories; socialism; collective biography; becoming; knowledge production Introduction In the history of modernity, children have commonly reflected societies’hopes and desires for the future (Stephens 1995; Silova, Piattoeva, and Millei 2018; Millei and Imre 2015). Perhaps more than any other group of human beings, children were viewed as central to the political, economic, and social (re)making of societies. An offspring of modernity, the socialist project had a particular preoccupation with childhood and children who were perceived to embody –both as human beings and metaphorically –a new social order (Kirschenbaum 2001; Kelly 2007; Millei 2011; Mead and Silova 2013; Silova, Piattoeva, and Millei 2018). ‘A new “script”for childhood’governed children’s upbringing and education to achieve this new order (Kirschenbaum 2001, 6). Children were also required to actively engage in building a bright socialist future. They participated in political organisations, such as pioneer or youth groups, or in economic production, during harvest-time or in summer camps. To pursue their agendas, both the political regime and researchers used top-down political socialisation theories which not only disregarded children’s everyday lives but also considered children as malleable tabula rasa onto which new political ideals, norms, values, knowledge and behaviours could be written by adults. In many ways, socialist manifestations of modernity can be understood as extraordinary times for childhood studies, since the engineering of a new society hinged so intensively on childhood and children. In this paper, we want to explore how ordinary © 2019 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. CONTACT Zsuzsa Millei Zsuzsa.Millei@staff.uta.fi CHILDREN’S GEOGRAPHIES https://doi.org/10.1080/14733285.2019.1648759 children’s lives within different socialist systems can say something about these extraordinary times and societies. Everyday life ‘could not be easily reduced to the dichotomies of official and unofficial, the public and the private, the state and the people, or childhood and adulthood’and was differentiated even further in the diverse spaces and economic periods of the Soviet Union and the eastern bloc (Yurchak 2006, 6). Children skilfully navigated the paradoxes of everyday life while experiencing mixed feelings of attachment, optimism, dullness, and alienation towards state expectations (Silova, Piattoeva, and Millei 2018). When children engaged in highly ideologised institutional practices, their participation ranged from following to resisting the official political regime spotted with many inconsequential and often invisible acts. As everywhere else in the world, children also participated in activities that were not explicitly or overtly ideological in nature. Memories of everyday life during the Cold War provide ample evidence of the kinds of vibrant lives that escaped, transgressed or rearticulated ‘authoritative script’(Yurchak 2006, 290). Gaining a glimpse into children’s ordinary lives through memories would therefore enable us to overcome various dualist modes of thinking that are present in Cold War narratives. It could also illuminate the wider sociopolitical matrices in which children’s everyday lives unfolded and how children variously positioned themselves alongside those (Philo 2016). In particular, recognition of the diversity of socialist economies and spaces, and the era of the Cold War can trouble easy interpretations of how it was to live a ‘socialist childhood’. Emphasising the continuities, ruptures, and relations between different geographical regions (including the two sides of the Iron Curtain) and different historical times (different periods of socialism in different countries and pasts, presents, and futures), can thus develop rich understanding about societal processes and change, and children’s embeddedness in and engagements with those (Silova, Piattoeva, and Millei 2018). The analytical process through which we can gain insights about wider sociopolitical matrices, diverse lived childhoods, notions of ‘the child’and children’s multiple beings and becomings, is what we refer to here as ‘thinking through’ childhood. ‘Thinking through’childhood can also help us consider the complex engagement of children with unfolding social change in present day contexts, including anthropogenic climate crisis, geopolitics, biopolitics, extremist ideologies and their historical antecedents. ‘Thinking through’childhood by using memories of childhood requires epistemological, ontological, and methodological rethinking and retooling which we undertake in this paper. We discuss the analytical approach we take for the cultural-political analysis of childhood memories that foregrounds children’s stories as remembered by adults (see Silova et al. 2016; Silova, Piattoeva, and Millei 2018). We argue for the use of memories as a productive tool to gain insights into children’s everyday lives. We engage in this paper with memory stories that are produced through collective biography. The method of collective biography is associated with Haug et al. (1987), subsequently retooled in a poststructural vein by Davies and Gannon (2006) and Gonick and Gannon (2014). It is an approach to research that foregrounds the shared generation and analysis of systematically recalled memories to explore the effects of structural, systemic, discursive and affective processes on the emergence of particular subjects, such as the neoliberal subject, the gendered subject, and the academic subject, or the child subject (e.g. Davies and Gannon 2006; Gonick and Gannon 2014; Hawkins et al. 2016; Silova, Piattoeva, and Millei 2018). Researchers working with collective biography acknowledge that ‘there might well be no single, “true”method that is alone appropriate for this kind of work,’because ‘the very heterogeneity of everyday life demands similarly heterogenous methods if it is to be understood’ (Haug et al. 1987,70–71). Depending on particular configurations of a research collective, participants may approach collective biography differently in terms of the ways in which they choose topics, invoke memories, incorporate other modalities (e.g. including images and objects, art-making and theatre), as well as in how they go about writing, rewriting and analysing the memories (see Haug et al. 1987; Davies and Gannon 2006; Gonick and Gannon 2014). Rather than a fixed methodological approach, it is crucial that each collective describes the particular processes that emerged as most suitable for their work. 2Z. MILLEI ET AL. At a broader conceptual and methodological level, our approach to collective biography shares several key elements with previous research. In collective biography, memory stories and their analysis are produced in the intersubjective spaces of a group of participants and in the interrelations between participants’presents and pasts. In a similar manner to memory studies, collective biography asserts that memories can offer insights to the social sciences ‘over and above historical research’ (Keightley 2010, 55). Memory is not a substitute for historical research nor is it a ‘direct conduit to historical truth’; rather memory is a ‘topic of research and a mode of investigation’that should be considered ‘on its own terms, distinct from the epistemological criteria of history’(Keightley 2010, 56). Collective biography collapses the binary that separates the knowledge generating expert from the layperson remembering. Subject and object of research fold into each other. We adopt approaches to memory writing that focus on specific moments and scenes, that attend to the corporeality of memories, and we draft and redraft our memory stories in an iterative process of careful listening, reading, writing and rewriting (Davies and Gannon 2006; Gonick and Gannon 2014; Haug et al. 1987). As researchers adapting this method, we search for understanding of how we have ‘participated in our own past experience’(Haug et al. 1987, 35). Thus, we focus on the commonalities and differences in the remembering practices and memories of those children (us) 1 who grew up in Central and Eastern European socialist countries. We explore how childhoods are contoured by the powerful institutions, discourses and practices pressing against them and at the same time describe these discourses and practices in terms of transformations. Childhood memory stories written through collective biography extend beyond the individual, connecting private and public remembering and individual and collective interpretations in multifaceted and reciprocal ways. Each telling of a memory story calls forth more stories, mobilising resonances (and nuances of difference and detail) between stories. During the Cold War, former socialist countries were described with the construct of the ‘second world,’in contrast to the ‘first world’that was claimed for the capitalism of ‘the west’. This notion of the second world signalled specific conditions unifying a range of regions, socialist economies and societal processes which themselves changed during the Cold War and had distinct variations in various national contexts. To highlight this complexity of the time-spaces of historical socialism and what followed, we use the term ‘(post)socialist spaces’that for us acknowledges complexities and changing conditions in particular locales. The notion of the ‘second world’after 1989 was reinterpreted in temporal terms, as the period post or after socialism. This temporal understanding however ignores the ‘millions of people who share the experience of being branded for several decades as “the (communist) East”and who are still inhabiting this symbolic East which is fragmenting today under the pressure of new geopolitical divisions and North/South axes’(Tlostanova 2017,1–2). In sum, for us the term ‘(post)socialist’indicates unfinished configurations and changing economic and sociopolitical conditions and various time-spaces attached to particular locales. After laying out some coordinates for this paper, we continue by introducing earlier research on childhood and socialist transformations. Then, we explain those considerations that shaped our development of a methodology for working with childhood memories of everyday life in (post)socialist spaces. Finally, we offer three explicit analytical moves to show how ‘thinking with’memories while ‘thinking through’childhood opens opportunities for coming to know children’s everyday lives and the social transformations within which they take place. We also reflect on how researchers are becoming with memory work and conclude with some thoughts on how memory work can inform our present analyses of children’s everyday lives. Research on childhoods and socialist transformations During the Cold War, the region experienced socialist modernisation, incorporating accelerated industrialisation, economic development, militarisation and cultural transformation. State ownership was extended to industry and the market, which were centrally governed following five-year CHILDREN’S GEOGRAPHIES 3 plans that set out development and economic goals. Socialism as an ideologically shaped counterculture to capitalism aimed to create new, morally and psychologically superior human beings whose consciousness would be re-oriented away from materialism and individuality. Children were seen as playing an important two-fold role in this project. First, symbolic children represented the possibility of modernisation and cultural transformation towards a more equal and collective-oriented society. Second, real children were seen as important civic and political actors, and as an impressionable segment of the population and hence as embodying the new politics, social order and society. In this context, the perception, fulfilment, and facilitation of the needs, capacities, and interests of real children were often mixed with constructions of an idealised modern and collective-oriented childhood. The centrality afforded to children in the utopian notions of a communist society and their actual roles in realising the new society had a direct impact on knowledge production about childhood and on children’s political socialisation. A spectrum of academic fields, including psychology, pedagogy, medicine and social pedagogy, provided the increasingly professionalising workforce with the required knowledge to regulate and mold new types of citizens. In particular, political socialisation under socialism was distinctive in two aspects (Cheng 2009). First, in place of the espousal of loyalty to the nation and the transmission of basic norms and values that are common features of political socialisation in all societies, the communist party was identified with the state. Therefore the ideological doctrine of the party also underpinned the norms of everyday life. Political socialisation did not only require autonomous efforts from all segments of society, but also loyalty to the regime, which was imposed on individuals through political organisations. Second, political socialisation went beyond mere civic education to embrace a form of personal development that required children to participate actively in political, ideological, and economic activities. The political world of the child was thus intertwined with that of the adults, requiring children to participate in everyday political practices relating to institutions and peer cultures. While socialist ideology framed childhoods in specific ways, we argue that ‘children understood those governing mandates on their own terms –sometimes explicitly resisting them, sometimes being oblivious to them, and sometimes infusing these mandates with their own meanings’(Silova, Piattoeva, and Millei 2018, 5). Alongside ideologically scripted spaces, children led their lives in mundane spaces of everyday life. However, studies of childhood during the Cold War on both sides of the Iron Curtain have tended to ignore mundane spaces of childhood and those spaces where dissent, transgression, and resistance to ideological prescriptions took place (Connell 1987; Millei and Kallio 2018). Universalising research narratives also brushed aside the complex realities that shaped different childhoods in diverse socialist spaces. The research was often framed by dichotomies such as capitalist/socialist, religious/atheist and imperialist/liberationist. It obscured internal differences, overlooking connections and similarities with the West across different spheres of life, and paid insufficient attention to local political and ideological debates, the role of non-Party organisations (such as the church), and the plethora of other social, economic, political, and cultural formations present in socialist states. Overall, most research published during the Cold War produced a familiar, yet inevitably onesided, image of childhood, predominantly expressed in such universalising tropes as ideological indoctrination or oppression (Silova, Millei, and Piattoeva 2018). Writing against this historical and epistemological background, we felt compelled to decentre the ‘master narratives’of both (post)- socialism and modern childhood in order to open spaces for sharing more complicated and varied accounts (Silova, Piattoeva, and Millei 2018). In our memories, children (us) appeared as agents in their own lives. This positioning helped us decentre narratives that constituted children as passive receivers of societal norms in memory stories we have produced as part of an ongoing research project commenced in 2014. 2 In this paper, we focus on the methodological considerations we had to contend with in order to be able to say 4Z. MILLEI ET AL. something about past children’s lives, and historical constructions of childhoods and societies from memories told by adults. Epistemological, ontological, and methodological retooling Epistemologically, to gain accounts of children’s lives from their perspectives, socialisation-oriented research has to be turned ‘upside down’. This task resonates with the project that Frigga Haug and her colleagues accomplished in their seminal text on memory-work, Female Sexualization (1987), co-authored by a collective of women in Hamburg and Berlin who formed around the Socialist Women’s Association (Sozialistischer Frauenbund), and the Marxist journal Das Argument. They committed to working with childhood memories in order to trace women’s subordination to patriarchal structures. The German title –Frauenformen or ‘women’s forms’–suggests their interest in the formation of gendered subjects, in what later came to be called ‘subjectification’through Foucault (eg. Davies and Gannon 2006). Their earliest memories reached back into fascist ideologies and idealised notions of femininity and young female bodies that were part of the project of the state (e.g. what they came to call the ‘hair project’, the ‘legs project’). Memories of childhoods similarly bring into focus children’s‘mundane lives as permeated by politics in which they have their own positions and roles’(Kallio and Häkli 2011, 21). Through analysing these memory stories it is possible to explore how children have produced their own spaces outside, within and against spaces and discourses that adults constructed for them. They also allow us to explore how those accounts are bound together by the possibilities that one can act within available frames, such as social pressure to conform, imperatives of economic survival, or conditions given by culture, history and schooling. Haug and colleagues wanted to understand what those conditions were and what they reveal about society’s control of sexuality, love and gender, since as they argued, what ‘we perceive as “personal”ways of adapting to the social are also generalizable modes of appropriation’(Haug et al. 1987, 44). Haug and colleagues’aim was to identify those experiences that were subjugated by various conditions, for example enjoyment of diverse sensual pleasures. They saw within this work the key to liberate themselves from these pressures and to avoid reproducing experiences in the future in which their desires were limited by particular conditions. Poststructural approaches to collective biography however are distanced from biographical research that assumes a unitary and bounded individual proceeding through life and who can liberate herself from societies’power structures. Instead they call attention to how ‘we are discursively, affectively, materially constituted’at all times, and to the inherent instability of these forces (Gonick and Gannon 2014, 6). Thus memories produced through collective biography can point to social relations, dominant discourses, affects and emotions and materialities within which subjectivities and experiences are produced and performed. Exploring these memories can provide important analytical incisions into the social norms, values, issues and concerns driving and producing societal, cultural/ideological changes and social transformation. Ontologically, these considerations raise a related issue about children’s‘otherness’in viewing, understanding and negotiating the world (Jones 2008). As Jones (2013, 4) explains, adults have limited access to how children have to live within adult orders, spaces and systems, and how they seek to, or have to, build their own spatialities within that—how children’s becoming suffuses through adult spaces in ways which are not easily knowable by adults, but perhaps can be glimpsed in various ways. Children and adults have different positionings in becoming human, there are adult-becomings and child-becomings that are folded together in any search for understanding children and childhood (Jones 2008). This entails an ‘ongoing flow of interconnects and disconnects’between adult created spaces and children’s spatialities (Jones 2013), and adult-becomings and child-becomings (Jones 2008). Identifying these flows and connections can also point to the possible mobilisation of different discourses and to the larger societal processes within which those take place. In this way, memories CHILDREN’S GEOGRAPHIES 5 of childhood open spaces through which we can glimpse how children navigate adult orders and spaces from their own positionings and trouble views about children’s lives that have become stale or stereotyped. We refer here, for example, to analyses that unify and singularise children’s experiences during socialism. Methodologically, such a shift raises important questions of representation, such as who can represent children’s lives (Jones 2001; see also Piattoeva, Silova, and Millei 2017). The question of whether adults can intimate children’s lives is a part of the problematic of studying all kinds of human groupings, since there is often a gulf between the people studied and researchers. A central tension for us here is that in studying (memories of) children and childhood, adult researchers are removed from children’s ways of living their worlds (Philo 2003). Researching and thinking about childhood and children suffers from a form of ‘colonisation’, the use of adult frames in understanding childhood and children’s lives (Jones 2001,2008). Folded into the present of the adult person remembering, memories of childhood are therefore difficult to isolate: how childhood was felt from within, the ways in which the child sensed and thought about the world. In memories, the two are folded into each other in ‘very complex and obscure ways’(Jones 2013, 6). First, adults’memories of childhood change forms as they are repeatedly reimagined in relation to different times and spaces (Keightley 2010). Second, memories are often informed by what Philo (2003, 10) terms ‘popular mythologies’of childhood, common knowledges, concepts and views that shape adults’perspectives, including ideologised views and academic interpretations. Walled within these interpretations, memories of childhood thus require new frames to explore beyond adult, ideologised, and scientific expositions. We will come back to this point and the related analytical work it requires. Imaginative construction always accompanies childhood memories to fill in gaps between fragments. Philo (2003) contends that ‘reveries’of childhood can open avenues to the intimate spaces of children’s worlds. In reveries, reality and imagination are indistinguishable, and in these spaces, senses of childhood return, such as in pointless acts, retraced movements, smells of rooms, lights in the afternoon, sensations of the damp cold air of a basement on our skin, materialities. As memories are re-inhabited, details of the scenes proliferate and the remembering subject experiences affective and sensory surges. This way of working with memories is productive and can often tell more about childhood than cognitive efforts that attempt to logically retrace past events. As Horton and Kraftl (2006a, 261) found through their own ‘thinking/writing/doing’around fragments of childhood memories, ‘some of these happenings were less the fruit of purely cognitive “remembering”than of “re-doing”or “being (t)here again”’. For the possibility to (re)inhabit childhood, a distance needs to be created, we must suspend what we think we already know. As Castañeda (2002, 11) suggests, we should know children’s world ‘otherwise’,‘through some form of un-knowing’. For us, this access to childhood can be gained through memory stories produced in collective biographies. Sharing memories in a group helps to create suspense and creates paces to re-inhabit memories through processes of telling, acting, sensing, listening, reflecting, writing, rewriting, sharing and collectively exploring and interrogating stories (Davies and Gannon 2006). Imagination is also an important part of this process. Processes of remembering and reimagining enable details to proliferate and make affect, sensation and embodied experience available for exploration. ‘Thinking through’memories reveals connections between childhoods, children’s lives, wider social matrices and social transformations. In this understanding, ‘the child’is both subject and object of research in specific places and times, and beyond these ‘the child’(or childhood) is deployed as a figure across times and spaces in relation to historical movements (Philo 2016). Thinking through memories of childhood: from small spaces to large social processes Memory stories and their analysis are produced in the intersubjective spaces of collective biography participants and in the interrelations between participants’presents and pasts. Crucially, while remaining aware of this circularity of time, we explore these memories in relation to broader social 6Z. MILLEI ET AL. issues and relations of power at the time of events that memories tell about. Haug and her colleagues examined gender, sexuality, love, and desire, and their appropriation by institutions ranging through the family, schooling, religion, and the state (1987). These interests continue in more recent collective biography research (Davies and Gannon 2006; Gonick and Gannon 2014). However, childhood memories as the nexus for collaborative investigation remain the most powerful strand of such research. In memory stories, children adapt in ‘personal’ways to the social, and comparing and contrasting those stories enables us to bring into light generalisable modes of mobilisation of broader cultural, social and political ideals, governing norms and transformations taking place in these societies. This differs from conventional historical approaches in that we work from the bottomup, beginning with memories in all their multiplicities, material and sensory details and affective potencies. We are interested in the mobilisation of these ideals, norms and transformations at the most intimate scale. During collective memory sharing, resonances between memories can emerge. Resonances are subtle, nonlinear, affective, and often non-cognitive echoes between memory stories. They might also be feelings echoing and calling up other feelings and details. Resonances within fragments of memories might point us to similarities in the quality of spaces in which events took shape, the presence of shared subject positions and feelings, embodiments: crying, laughing, clumsiness, identifications of what mattered for us as children and our desires for the present and future, and whether what mattered to us could also be important for other children (Horton and Kraftl 2006b). Moreover, working this way means that ‘new realisations, new happenings, new pieces of writing, new reflections and recollections, new laughs and sighs’can emerge (Horton and Kraftl 2006b, 261). In what follows, we introduce three different analytical moves for working with memory stories of childhood, which we have crystallized through our previous work and thinking. We have applied some of these moves in our previous collective biographies and memory writing, as well as in our attempts to read across memory stories (Millei et al. 2017). These moves operationalise the epistemological, ontological, and methodological considerations we have developed and explicitly focus on the task of thinking through memories of childhood in order to gain insights into wider matrices of sociopolitical conditions and social transformations. They mean that the collective biography processes that we have developed do not merely entail the passive production and collection of individual memories but they entail rigorous and careful collective work on and with the memories. Working through dominant interpretative fragments Memory stories often incorporate interpretative fragments or explanations that may have developed through multiple telling of stories in different times and spaces. These interpretative fragments might be judgements about childhood and / or socialism drawing on prior knowledge, theories, popular knowledge, and images that surround childhood stories have gained through the multiple tellings they have undergone. Interpretative fragments are also operative in our different contexts, making people social and socialising us within larger social processes however they can tend to overcode and draw on habituated ways of explaining events or on clichés and assumptions (Davies and Gannon 2006). Looking out for these, subjecting them to careful exploration and analysis, and removing them or reducing their effects as we redraft and interrogate our memory stories can help us move away from quick and easy interpretations and force us to reflect on how our thinking and perceptions were also ideologized, through ‘interpretative models, feelings, thoughts, snippets of popular wisdom, judgements’(Haug et al. 1987, 59) prevailing in socialist spaces, in our education history, or in different contexts in which we lived. Instead of presenting the assumedly objective facts, through our processes we claim that knowledge emerges in the in-between spaces of memories, in the ways in which they affect us, where something surprising disrupts the usual way of thinking and feeling. How they affect us poses questions that require re-examination of taken-for-granted CHILDREN’S GEOGRAPHIES 7 views about everyday life (Davies and Gannon 2006). When stories become all too familiar and lack detail, or when they resonate in strange or unidentifiable ways, there is a chance that interpretative fragments might inform those. The process of thinking through memories, and the iterative processes of collective biography enable us to critically address these. It is also helpful to position memory stories against various normative prescriptions and subject positions –socialist selves –produced by socialist ideologies, Cold War and transition research, as well as literary texts aiming to interpret socialist subjectivities. Chatterjee and Petrone (2008, 982– 983) have described many of these positionalities or models of selfhood that Western historians applied ‘to the various dimensions of Soviet [and socialist] subjectivity and used these to explore its location and its performance in the realms of the private and public’. These models of selfhood draw on various theoretical frameworks that allow for reading and explaining everyday life but also orient the researcher to pay attention to particular negotiations that the self engages in, while disregarding others. Chatterjee and Petrone (2008) demonstrate the importance of being reflective about the frames of selfhood in research that construct socialist subjectivities and shape interpretation of those societies and cultures. Thus, in the analysis of memories, reflexivity to these types of interpretations and positionalities is necessary. For example, one notion of the socialist self is the ‘image of a lonely, atomized and fearful’self (Chatterjee and Petrone 2008, 983) referring to an individual who is powerless or less able to take action against imposed norms and structural power prevalent in socialist regimes. Perhaps this is the construction of selfhood that stands closest to popular Cold War frames. This prototype of a socialist individual could appear in memory stories as a teacher who blindly follows ideological prescriptions and rules, the student as passive recipient of norms or a person who learned not to initiate on her own as it might lead to trouble with authoritarian personalities or the authorities. Another conception of the self is built on a productive notion of power. These individuals might appear in memory stories as actively fashioning themselves against the normative construction of the socialist self which produced the illusion that they were acting autonomously without some ideological constructions’normative or governing effects (Chatterjee and Petrone 2008). This figure can appear in stories as a teacher who is explicitly acting against the norms of socialist personhood –seemingly acting on his or her own will –for example, not teaching according to the party line or giving alternative historical truths. Questions then must be asked, what other rules and norms guided these assumed free choices and actions, and could a person actually act in this singular way? What is silenced when this interpretation takes priority and what other possible readings remain unexplored? Answering these questions could bring us closer to those discursive frames and norms that operated in those moments, telling us about alternative spaces in society besides stated and known ideology. By looking out for these positionalities and easy explanations present in our memory stories and by interrogating these interpretative fragments, we can explore what the embodied, affective and material details in the memory stories tell about how we positioned ourselves and performed our childhood at the intersections of mundane individual and social realms. In these mundane acts, like Haug’s collective also found, practices associated with disciplining bodies and souls that ran alongside stated ideals, and performing routine acts were particularly productive in our shaping as social actors. And these are precisely the acts, feelings, and sensations that resonated in our memory stories. Exploring these resonances enabled us to better understand wider matrices of power in societies and transformations without stopping our analysis at scripted ideological expectations that have not only shaped the creation of our memory stories but also intensively shaped previous academic research. Working with and across the production of child subjectivities and notions of childhood In their collective biography, Haug et al. (1987) explored the process usually defined as ‘female socialisation’. They operationalised this process in a way that would avoid circumventing ‘the active participation of individuals in their formation as social beings’(33). They instead investigated the 8Z. MILLEI ET AL.