State Socialist Childhoods

Harvard FAS

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…