Professor Nelli Piattoeva: public lecture „Restor(y)ing (post)socialist childhoods“

On 21 November, from 16:15 to 17:45, Nelli Piattoeva, Professor of sociology of education at Tampere University, will give a lecture in Room 204 at Lossi 36.

You can also participate via Zoom: https://ut-ee.zoom.us/j/94217408821?pwd=c0F2c1VPYjRQMzlyUlBUZXBRMWl1Zz09

The English description of the lecture and a short profile of Professor Piattoeva can be found here:

Restor(y)ing (post)socialist childhoods

Nelli Piattoeva, Tampere University, Faculty of Education and Culture

This lecture presents work in a collaborate project Recollect/Reconnect: Crossing the Divides through Memories of Cold War Childhoods that engaged with the collective biography approach (Davies and Gannon, 2006) combined with art practice. The project focused on scholar and artist participants’ experiences of growing up in socialist and post-socialist societies in Europe and beyond. Collective biography creates memory stories to explore micro-moments and micro-processes of subject formation through discursive effects, and affective and material entanglements. Our project assembled everyday childhood memories from across the so-called post-socialist spaces as a form of “missing” data. We gathered memory stories that were either erased or forgotten, delegitimized or essentialized, or at best reinterpreted nostalgically within the surviving Cold War frameworks. My lecture will address questions such as what we can learn about education, childhood and post-socialist societies by engaging with childhood memories, and how and why to initiate research practices that bring together researchers across disciplines and persistent real and imaginary borders in Europe, artists and scientists, and extend beyond typical spaces of research dissemination to engage the public through work in museums, for instance.

Nelli Piattoeva is Professor of sociology of education at Tampere University, Finland. Her research focuses on the changing means of the governance of schooling (e.g., datafication) and on the role of schooling is societal governance (e.g., the role of formal education in nation-building). She is also interested in examining socialist and post-socialist histories in general and childhood and schooling under socialism and post-socialism in particular through memories of cultural insiders and research produced in the region. She is co-director of the Laboratory of International Assessment Studies. At Tampere University she leads an interdisciplinary Research Centre on Transnationalism and Transformation (TRANSIT).