Researching Social Upheaval and Emerging Political Agencies through Childhood Memories

Abstract

Emerging from a collective biography research, we study childhood memories of adult narrators who personally experienced social upheavals as children during the late 1980s and early 1990s in Romania, Russia, and Mozambique. Drawing on affect theory and agential materialism, and paying particular attention to human and non-human entities - atmospheres, emotions, child-adult relationships, routines, and timespaces - the chapter shows how the very political, maybe as minor gestures or series of differentiation, is entangled in the mattering of the world and figures or reiterates possibilities for agencies. Social upheavals and children’s politics are mutually constitutive and emerge in their intra-active becoming.