Reconfiguring Timespaces of Childhood
20-21 October 2021
Programme
A conference held at Tampere-talo, Tampere and online, October 20-21, 2021
*All times are given in Eastern European Summer Time*
Wednesday, October 20
8:30–9:00 Arrival and welcome on-site (coffee and tea)
9:00–10:30 Session 1: Weaving Memory Stories of Nature
Hanna Sjögren: Archived childhood. Memories of nature
Anna Kathryn Kendrick: Solitude Child-Poet
Riikka Hohti & Tuure Tammi: Multispecies storytelling and inhuman memory. Fostering materialdiscursive mutations in ethnographic research in the Anthropocene
10:30–10:45 Break
10:45–12:15 Session 2 Panel: A Past Awaiting a Present to do it Justice: Childhood memories in the Middle East
Leyla Neyzi: Past’s Futures in a Disillusioned Present: Childhood Memories of Kurdish Youth
Heidi Morrison: The Dignity of a Story: Portraiture as a Method of Decriminalizing Palestinian Childhood Memories
Arek Dakessian: Childhood Memories in Beirut’s Dilapidated Histories
12:15–11:30 Break
12:30–13:30 Session 3 (two parallel sessions)
The Sticky Spaces of Childhood
Nadezhda Vasileva: The materiality of the past in the present: Remembering school toilets and post-Soviet girlhood
Vendula Hnídková: Playgrounds and transformations of nature in the Cold War
Entangled Politics of Childhood
Mehmet Volkan Kaşıkçı: From Kazakhstan with happiness: The myth of happy childhood and its reception in Kazakhstan
Monica Ruethers: Photographs of children and young people in Russian (counter)narratives on the 90s
13:30–14:15 Lunch Break
14:15–15:45 Session 4 (two parallel sessions)
On Meaningful Work and Eco-Ethical Responsibility: Memories of Childhood and Education in Urban and Rural Contexts
Agnes Krynski: Tying back the Iron Curtain: An autoethnography of childhood memories of informal and formal educational experiences in two bordering lifeworlds
Rebecca Martusewicz: On learning eco-ethical virtues: Childhood memories of meaningful work, love, and responsibility
Barbara Turk Niskač: Exploring more-than-human sociality and meaning making through work embedded rural lifestyles
On Belonging: Weaving Childhood Memories Across Generations and Times
E Lev Feinman: Performing Childhood: How Transgender Adults Are Nurturing Their Inner (Trans) Child through Age-Play
Meighan Mantei: Affective assemblages: Land, resources and belonging
John H. McKendrick: Thank goodness for poverty. Professional footballers recollections on growing up in Scotland
15:45–16:00 Break
16:00–17:00 Session 5 Online Trans Hub Opening: Tentacular Anarchive: Memories of Childhood through Scholarly, Pedagogical, and Artistic Engagements
MnemoZin: Digital anarchive: (Re)stor(y)ing Cold War childhoods
Elena Jackson Albarran: Anarchive, oral histories, and teaching comparative Cold War childhoods across geographies and generations
Raisa Foster: Anarchive and artistic research
17:00–19:00 Kaleidoscope: Children of the Cold War exhibition
Guided visit in the Kaleidoscope: Children of the Cold War exhibition at 18:00–18:30
19:00-21:00 Dinner
Thursday, October 21
8:30–9:00 Arrival onsite (coffee and tea)
9:00–10:30 Session 6: Entangled Webs of Emotions, Migration, and Women’s Rights
Mette Buchardt, Katarina Kärnebro & Christina Osbeck: “Outer space” as secular Cold War spirituality? Children’s drawings and texts on “life questions” in the 1980s welfare-state Sweden in a history of emotion perspective
Gordana Jovanović: Migrating childhood: Childhood in shifting political ideologies
Rahim Rahimov: Connections of childhood memories/experiences to granting suffrage for women in Azerbaijan: Shusha Realny School in Focus
10:30–10:40 Break
10:40–11:40 Session 7: Sticky Questions of Method
Erica Burman: Challenges and resources in interpreting narratives of childhood memories
Pia Koivunen: “I wanted to see the man with that mark on his forehead:” Autoethnographic approach to childhood experiences
11:40–11:50 Break
11:50–13:20 Session 8: Spinning Threads of Memory Work
Camila Rosa Ribeiro: Becomings that future cannot hold
Owain Jones: Memory as ecology as mycelia: Creating the present by digesting the past?
Mante Vertelyte, Iram Khawaja & Dorthe Staunæs: Memories of childhood dolls across geopolitical spaces and social structures
13:20–14:00 Lunch Break
14:00–15:30 Session 9: Artists’ Memory Webs
Rosamaría Bolom, Irina Kreer-Boulay, Outi Korhonen, Alejandro Olarte & Arlene Tucker: Artworks at My Childhood exhibition
Nina Vurdelja: Thinking with/of watery bodies: notes of an almost-a-swimmer
Linda Lapiņa: Migrant mermaid. Embodied re-membering’s interwoven timespaces
15:30–15:40 Break
15:40–17:10 Session 10: Common Worlding and Webbing
Camila Rosa Ribeiro, Arlene Tucker, Jay Albaos & Leonardo Dias: Performative provocations as pedagogy: snippets from a collaborative artistic research process
Esther Pretti, Iveta Silova, Ann Nielsen, Janna Goebel & Jieyu Jiang: Reclaiming multispecies worlds: Childhood memories of common worlding
Virginia Caputo: In the blood of turtles: Aging and childhood memories in a time of pandemic
17:10–17:30 Conference closing: Connecting Threads
18:30 Dinner
About
Memory is a productive force that (re)shapes the pasts, presents, and futures. Memories are also of and about relations (Arnold, Shepherd and Gibbs, 2008). They exist in relations with times and spaces, ourselves and others, events and objects, with humans and non-human species. It is possible to approach memories as distributed between humans and more-than-human participants. On the one hand, material objects are constitutive of (collective) memories (e.g. childhood objects, monuments, museums) and help establish social identities. How we collect, store, categorize and represent memories also gives a shape to them. On the other hand, by being virtually present in events, memories “materially affect the world (just as they themselves are affected by events)” (Fox and Alldred, 2019, 21).
The (re)collection and the affectivity of remembering/forgetting are contingent, emergent, relational, and continuously re-actualized in the here-and-now. The inherent entanglement of memories makes them at once durable, malleable, and mobile – relying on multiple connections while also capable of forming them.
Inspired by the broad theme of webs and threads, we call on participants to think about memories beyond the ‘mnemonic fever’ (Huyssen, 1995), which marks our time obsessed with recording and archiving for self-fashioning or collective heritage. We ask:
- How do childhood memories connect and are connected to events that produce the world around us?
- How do remembering and forgetting childhoods forge connections across times and spaces?
- How do the means of (re)collecting, storing, memorizing, and (re)presenting memories affect how, what, and whose childhoods are being re-collected and produced as social identities?
- How do personal memories impact the production of social (including the human and more-than-human) continuity and change?
- How do childhood memories of nature and the planet – from rock collections to foraging in forests or looking after injured wildlife – form attachments to place, land and Earth during the Anthropocene, and reactivate emotions associated with geological processes and multispecies common worlds?
- How do the unfinished transformations that were part of the Cold War complicate and continue to influence the trajectory of the futures in the present? Do memories carry unrealized (past) futures and anticipatory visions that disrupt the present or reconfigure the future (Craps et al. 2018, 503)?
- How do practices of archiving life (in museums, and on social media, websites etc,) produce lives, biographies, selves, worlds, social identities etc.? How do objects, photos, videos, and other types of representations play a role in those?
References:
Arnold, M., Shepherd, C. & Gibbs, M. (2008). Remembering things. Information Society, 24(1), 47-53.
Craps, S., Crownshaw, R., Wenzel, J., Kennedy, R., Colebrook, C., and Nardizzi, V. (2018). Memory studies and the Anthropocene: A roundtable. Memory Studies, 11(4), 498–515.
Fox, N.J. and Alldred, P. (2019). The Materiality of Memory: Affects, Remembering and Food Decisions. Cultural Sociology, 13(1), 20–36.
Haraway, D. (2019). It Matters What Stories Tell Stories; It Matters Whose Stories Tell Stories. a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, 34(3), 565-575.
Huyssen, A. (1995). Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia. New York: Routledge.
Contact e-mail for Tampere hub: recollectreconnect2021@tuni.fi
Image Copyright by Richard Burlton on Unsplash