Post‐socialist geopolitical uncertainties: Researching memories of childhood with ‘child as method’

This article engages continuing discussions in childhood studies on (re)inserting the study of childhood into wider socio‐political matrices of power and practices. We present as a potent analytical strategy to do this work ‘child as method’, developed by one of the authors. After describing ‘child as method’, we draw on the Recollect / Reconnect project, in which scholars and artists who grew up during the last decades of the Cold War recalled their childhood memories. We focus on ‘the child’ and ‘childhood’ as a position of geopolitical address, formulated by narrators to the reader as revealing emergent post‐socialist subjectivities and conditions.