Timescapes in Childhood Memories of Everyday Life During the Cold War

Keywords: collective memory, childhood, time, harvest, timescape

Abstract

During the Cold War, linear and future-oriented temporalities were enforced to accelerate social transformation on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Despite efforts to control time by bracketing complex human conditions, children were routinely engaged in everyday activities that followed different rhythms. Building on Barbara Adam’s notion of timescapes and drawing on collective biography research, this article examines different temporal experiences through childhood memories of harvesting in a forest, a family garden, and a collective farm. These memories reveal emotionally intense—embodied and embedded—temporal experiences of children entangled within timescapes of multiple and sometimes contradictory dimensions of human and more-than-human times.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

Metrics

Metrics Loading ...

References

Adam, B. (1998). Timescapes of modernity: The environment and invisible hazards. Routledge.

Adam, B. (2004). Time. Polity Press.

Adam, B. (2008). The timescapes challenge: Engagement with the invisible temporal. In B. Adam, J. Hockey, P. Thompson, & R. Edwards (Eds.), Researching lives through time: Time, generation, and life stories (pp. 7–12). Timescapes Working Paper Series No. 1 https://timescapes-archive.leeds.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/47/2020/07/WP1-Researching-Lives-Through-Time-June-2008.pdf

Bockman, J. (2011). Markets in the name of socialism: The left-wing origins of neoliberalism. Stanford University Press.

Burman, E. (2021). Developments: Child, image, nation. Routledge.

Davies, B., & Gannon, S. (2006). Doing collective biography: Investigating the production of subjectivity. Open University Press.

Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (2004). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (B. Massumi, Trans.). Continuum.

Folkers, A. (2021). Fossil modernity: The materiality of acceleration, slow violence, and ecological futures. Time & Society, 30(2), 223–246. https://doi.org/10.1177/0961463X20987965

Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. Vintage.

Ingold, T. (1993). The temporality of the landscape. World Archeology, 25, 152–174. https://doi.org/10.1080/00438243.1993.9980235

Ingold, T. (2011). Being alive: Essays on movement, knowledge, and description. Routledge.

Ingold, T. (2017). Taking taskscape to task. In U. Rajala & P. Mills (Eds.), Forms of dwelling: Twenty years of taskscapes in archeology (pp. 16–27). Oxbow Books.

Haug, F., S. Andresen, A. Bünz-Elfferding, C. Hauser, U. Lang, M. Laudan, M. Lüdermann, and U. Meir (1987). Female sexualization: A collective work of memory (E. Carter, Trans.) Verso.

Mah, A., & Wang, X. (2019). Accumulated injuries of environmental injustice: Living and working with petrochemical pollution in Nanjing, China. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 109(6), 1961–1977. https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2019.1574551

Manning, E. (2007). Politics of touch: Sense, movement, sovereignty. University of Minnesota Press.

McKay, A. (2016). Introduction. In A. Hom, C. McIntosh, & L. Stockdale (Eds.), Time, temporality, and global politics (pp. 1–19). E-International Relations Publishing.

Merchant, C. (1980). The death of nature: Women, ecology, and the scientific revolution. Harper Collins.

Millei, Z., Silova. I., & Gannon, S. (2019). Thinking through memories of childhood in (post)socialist spaces: Ordinary lives in extraordinary times. Children’s Geographies, 20(3), 324–337. https://doi.org/10.1080/14733285.2019.1648759

Murris, K., & Kohan, W. (2021). Troubling troubled school time: Posthuman multiple temporalities. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 34(7), 581–597. https://doi.org/10.1080/09518398.2020.1771461

Pacini-Ketchabaw, V. (2012). Acting with the clock: Clocking practices in early childhood. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 13(2), 154–160. https://doi.org/10.2304/ciec.2012.13.2.154

Rose, D. B. (2012). Multispecies knots of ethical time. Environmental Philosophy, 9(1), 127–140. http://dx.doi.org/10.5840/envirophil2012918

Scott, J. C. (1998). Seeing like a state. Yale University Press.

Shahjahan, R. A. (2018). Re/conceptualizing time in higher education. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 18(1)1–12. https://doi.org/10.1080/01596306.2018.1550041

Silova, I. (2019). Toward a wonderland of comparative education. Comparative Education, 55(4), 444–472. https://doi.org/10.1080/03050068.2019.1657699

Silova, I., Millei, Z., & Piattoeva, N. (2017). Interrupting the coloniality of knowledge production in comparative education: Postsocialist and postcolonial dialogues after the Cold War. Comparative Education Review, 61(S1), S74–S102. https://doi.org/10.1086/690458

Silova, I., Piattoeva, N., & Millei, Z. (Eds.). (2018). Childhood and schooling in (post)socialist societies: Memories of everyday life. Palgrave Macmillan.

Tesar, M., Farquhar, S., Gibbons, A., Myers, C. Y., & Bloch, M. N. (2016). Childhoods and time: Rethinking notions of temporality in early childhood education. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 17(4), 359–366. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1463949116677931

Walker, R. B. J. (1993). Inside/outside: International relations as political theory. Cambridge University Press.

Wien, C. A. (1996). Time, work, and developmentally appropriate practice. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 11, 377–403. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0885-2006(96)90013-7

ZIN, M., & Gannon, S. (2022). Scenes from a collective biography of Cold War childhoods: A decolonial ethnodrama. Cultural Studies <–> Critical Methodologies, 22(3), 235–244. https://doi.org/10.1177/15327086211068194

Published
2023-01-26
How to Cite
ZIN, M., & da Rosa Ribeiro, C. (2023). Timescapes in Childhood Memories of Everyday Life During the Cold War. Journal of Childhood Studies, 99-110. https://doi.org/10.18357/jcs202320547
Section
Articles from Research