Re-imagining socialist childhoods: Changing narratives of spatial and temporal (dis)orientations

Eleonora Teszenyi; Anikó Varga Nagy; Sándor Pálfi

doi:10.37291/2717638X.202233252

Authors

Eleonora Teszenyi The Open University https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7465-4988
Anikó Varga Nagy University of Debrecen https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5868-3156
Sándor Pálfi University of Debrecen https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0819-0235

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.37291/2717638X.202233252

Keywords:

Re-imagining socialist childhoods, Changing narratives, Childhood, Spatial (dis)orientations, Temporal (dis)orientations

Abstract

The focus of attention of this special issue has both personal and professional significance for the guest editors and most of the contributors, whose childhoods were touched by either the experience of socialism or its collapse and consequences. Influenced by Foucault’s (1977) idea that reporting evidence and significant moments from the past contributes to histories that are authentic and accurate, this special issue offers insights into the changing narratives of socialist and post-socialist childhoods. We are mindful of the risks associated with revisionism; that is, revisiting and, through that, re-evaluating the past in light of what we know in the present. Mitigating this risk, to some extent, is that many of the authors whose secondary research papers are published in this issue were privileged to work with original documents written in local languages. In this way, they were able to interrogate the past and reveal the nature of discourses and practices in order to make a contribution to better understand the present (Skehill, 2007).

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