Abstract
This conclusion builds on the conceptual foundations of our previous collaborative work on decolonizing knowledge production in and about (post)socialist societies. We develop three decolonial strategies to disrupt and complicate accounts of childhood, schooling, and subjectivities framed by and embedded in the epistemologies of modernity, socialist ideologies, and post-socialist “Westernization” projects. First, we highlight how memories of children’s lived experiences—situated in local and personal histories—enable us to multiply cultural imaginaries about childhood. Second, we trace relationalities between seemingly disparate spaces and times of childhoods, disrupting the linearity and singularity of time/space. Finally, 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.
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Notes
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Coloniality represents “the darker side of Western modernity” upon which Western empires founded themselves, as well as justified their imperial expansion and intervention across the world—whether as Christianity, civilization, modernization, and development after the World War II or market democracy after the fall of the Berlin Wall (Mignolo, 2001). Because “coloniality is constitutive and not derivative of modernity,” it is often written as “modernity/coloniality”: “The slash (/) that divides and unites modernity with coloniality means that coloniality is constitutive of modernity: there is no modernity without coloniality” (Mignolo, 2015, p. 2). Mignolo (2007) argues that both European and socialist traditions of the European Enlightenment carry a universal emancipating claim, terming it the “myth of modernity.” The concept of emancipation is based on the three revolutions of the eighteenth-century Europe that set the bourgeoisie free. The revolutions translated the idea into “the universal term of “humanity” (freedom) and set … the stage to export emancipation all over the world” (Mignolo, 2007, p. 455).
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Millei, Z., Silova, I., Piattoeva, N. (2018). Towards Decolonizing Childhood and Knowledge Production. In: Silova, I., Piattoeva, N., Millei, Z. (eds) Childhood and Schooling in (Post)Socialist Societies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62791-5_12
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