The Futures of Postsocialist Childhoods: (RE)IMAGINING THE LATVIAN CHILD, NATION, AND NATURE IN EDUCATIONAL LITERATURE

If we have learned anything from the last quarter-century of postsocialist transformations in Eastern Europe, it is that postsocialism is open, plural, and inevitably uncertain. Notwithstanding the prevalent expectation that the postsocialist world would eventually converge toward the Western ideals of neoliberal capitalism, we have instead witnessed neoliberal imaginaries losing their hegemony, postnational aspirations becoming increasingly elusive, and contemporary narratives of progress evolving into ambiguity. In a way, postsocialism has become an intellectual space from which we can critically interrogate and challenge the established frameworks of Western modernity, revealing new utopias and alternative conceptualizations of political, social, and cultural life