Toward Decolonizing Childhood and Knowledge Production

• In Event: Toward Decolonizing Childhood: Researching Memories of Everyday Life in (Post)Socialist Societies

Abstract

The final paper aims to ‘think with’ memories as part of an emerging intellectual project of decolonizing knowledge production and being, exploring the interrelations between memory, experience, and emergence. More specifically, the paper proposes to engage in the process of “delinking” (Mignolo, 2007, 2013), which challenges the “emancipatory project” of modernity and colonial relations and sets out to de-colonize knowledge and being. A de-colonial episteme seeks to bring to the fore other principles of knowledge and understanding and, consequently, other economies, other politics, and other ethics (Mignolo, 2007). First, we provide a brief overview of multiple forms of reasoning embedded in epistemologies of modernity, socialist ideologies, and postsocialist ‘Westernization’ projects that continue to colonize knowledge produced about children’s lives. We then outline three strategies that aid us in troubling and thinking beyond the knowledge claims these epistemologies have produced.

Our first strategy delinks from modernist ways of producing knowledge about childhood and children by using memories of lived experiences situated in local and personal histories. In this work, we have found Erica Burman’s (2016) tool, ‘child as method’ exceptionally helpful, as it aims to remove colonial cultural imaginaries from other ways of understanding childhood and children. Here, we propose to reference understandings and experiences of children in their localities embedded in memory stories, thus multiplying cultural imaginaries of childhood both in research and everyday life. Our second strategy takes as its target the coloniality of knowledge production about (post)socialist societies by multiplying and unveiling relations between concurrent spaces (that might be geographically distant). By folding out one space onto the other and thus connecting assumedly discrete times -the past and the present - in the same space, we disrupt linear time and the singularity of postsocialist trajectories envisioned by the logic of “catching up with Western liberal democracies.” These tools also aid our third strategy, since moving beyond colonial cultural imaginaries opens ways to other understandings of (post)socialist societies and childhoods that were previously marginalized or silenced by modernist and (post)socialist coloniality of power. This strategy also endows researchers located within the region to produce knowledge on their terms. Thus, we add our individual and collective efforts to discussions about the coloniality of being and explore ways to reclaim our positionalities (as children and researchers) as epistemic subjects who have both the legitimacy and capacity to look at the world from our own origins and lived realities. Furthermore, we discuss how coloniality of knowledge and being affects the various subjectivities we present about ourselves as children and researchers, and how memory research (re)shapes us in return.

By re-reading childhood memories presented in this session through this frame, as well as drawing on related memory research, we offer some examples of how these strategies might inform research practice. We also explore how the lived experiences of various childhoods - retold in memories - could help us engage in research that moves towards decoloniality of knowledge production and being - whether in (post)socialist spaces or beyond.

Authors

• Iveta Silova, Arizona State University - Tempe

• Nelli Piattoeva, University of Tampere

• Zsuzsanna Millei, University of Newcastle