8. The Secrets: Connections Across Divides

Beatrice Scutaru was born and lived for the first six years of her life in socialist Romania. After the violent change of regime, Beatrice witnessed the country’s transformation and its impact on her family, friends and everyday life. At the same time, certain things didn’t really seem to change. These experiences nourished an ever-growing interest in researching and reflecting on both changes and continuities between socialism and post-socialism. This, combined with her interest in childhood and growing up in Europe after 1945, led to her interest in the Reconnect/Recollect project. This turned out to be a transformative encounter, both personally and professionally. Within this project, Beatrice was not only inspired and challenged to engage with and think of new ways of producing and analyzing sources, but she also discovered and built a strong, diverse, and supportive transnational community.

Zsuzsa Millei was born in Hungary. After migrating to Australia in 2000, she enrolled in a PhD program. Her thesis focused on the history and politics of early childhood education and care in Western Australia. She had to be persuaded that there might be value in a study between the Australian system and the socialist Hungarian one, which she undertook later. She is still somewhat puzzled―although much less after the ‘Recollect/ Reconnect’ project―when researchers express enthusiasm for research on socialist childhoods. Perhaps it is due to her upbringing in a socialist country characterized by its explicit official politics (standing in line). At the same time, perhaps growing up in this context is what ignited her interest in researching children, childhood, and politics. She is also Mnemo ZIN with Nelli Piattoeva and Iveta Silova, good friends and comrades in research, art, and having fun.

Josefine Raasch is a social anthropologist. Growing-up in East-Berlin, she was a proud member of the socialist children and youth organizations. Later, working as a physiotherapist, she experienced the fall of the wall with confusion and questions. Another thirteen years later, she started studying European ethnology and education, followed by a PhD in Science and Technology Studies in Melbourne, Australia. The world was a different place after the wall fell, and even more so after experiencing Australia; so, Josefine has found her passion for investigating and translating logics. This passion found fertile grounds in postcolonial discourses on knowledge production. She then worked eight years in different positions in academia before she became a Senior Learning Designer at Germany’s leading business school. This school is located in the former state council of the German Democratic Republic and Josefine felt the irony every time she walked through the halls. Now, she works as an Agile Coach.

Katarzyna Gawlicz grew up in socialist Poland, moving back and forth between a small village and a large city. As a teenager, she spent one summer at a pioneer camp in the former Soviet Union, which was for her an illuminating experience of political socialization (whose meaning she grasped only later). Currently, she works as an associate professor of education at the University of Lower Silesia, Poland. In her teaching and research, she has focused on power relations and democracy in early childhood education, children’s rights, transformative learning through action research, and, recently, on relations between childhood and nation, and education in times of climate crisis.