Post-socialist geopolitical uncertainties: Researching memories of childhood with ‘child as method’

Abstract

This article engages continuing discussions in childhood studies on (re)inserting the study of childhood into wider socio-political matrices of power and practices. We present as a potent analytical strategy to do this work ‘child as method’, developed by one of the authors. After describing ‘child as method’, we draw on the Recollect/Reconnect project, in which scholars and artists who grew up during the last decades of the Cold War recalled their childhood memories. We focus on ‘the child’ and ‘childhood’ as a position of geopolitical address, formulated by narrators to the reader as revealing emergent post-socialist subjectivities and conditions.