State Socialist Childhoods
SLAVIC 294
Subject & Catalog Number
Course Information
Description
What was childhood in twentieth-century state socialist societies, and what came next? How did the Soviet Union attempt to educate, discipline, and mobilize children—and how did children variously inhabit, appropriate, or refuse those projects? This seminar explores childhood as a key site for the production of socialist subjectivity and state socialist governance, with particular attention to Soviet Ukraine. Drawing on childhood studies, Soviet history and anthropology, feminist theories of social reproduction, and memory studies, we examine the USSR as an anti-imperial empire and consider Ukraine’s place within its structures of power. Topics include debates over childhood agency; Cold War epistemologies; internal Soviet discussions of pedagogy and discipline; youth organizations and ritual life; feminist analyses of social reproduction; temporality and developmentalism; and post-socialist memory, nostalgia, and reassessments of the state socialist past. Literary, visual, and musical sources are analyzed alongside historical scholarship. Comparative readings address childhood in Maoist China, Hoxha’s Albania, Soviet Russia and Central Asia, and other Eastern bloc contexts. Students will also work with materials from the digital archive of the Kyiv Palace of Pioneers.
Course Notes
All readings will be available in English.
Available for Harvard Cross Registration
