Iveta Silova

Noah W. Sobe

Alla Korzh

Serhiy Kovalchuk

Reimaginig Utopias explores the shifting social imaginaries of post-socialist transformations to understand what happens when the new and old utopias of post-socialism confront the new and old utopias of social science. This peer-reviewed volume addresses the theoretical, methodological, and ethical dilemmas encountered by researchers in the social sciences as they plan and conduct education research in post-socialist settings, as well as disseminate their research findings. Through an interdisciplinary inquiry that spans the fields of education, political science, sociology, anthropology, and history, the book explores three broad questions: How can we (re)imagine research to articulate new theoretical insights about post-socialist education transformations in the context of globalization? How can we (re)imagine methods to pursue alternative ways of producing knowledge? And how can we navigate various ethical dilemmas in light of academic expectations and fieldwork realities? Drawing on case studies, conceptual and theoretical essays, autoethnographic accounts, as well as synthetic introductory and conclusion chapters by the editors, this book advances an important conversation about these complicated questions in geopolitical settings ranging from post-socialist Africa to Eastern Europe and Central Asia. The contributors not only expose the limits of Western conceptual frameworks and research methods for understanding post-socialist transformations, but also engage creatively in addressing the persisting problems of knowledge hierarchies created by abstract universals, epistemic difference, and geographical distance inherent in comparative and international education research. This book challenges the readers to question the existing education narratives and rethink taken-for-granted beliefs, theoretical paradigms, and methodological frameworks in order to reimagine the world in more complex and pluriversal ways.

Theory and Method for Educational Research in Post-Socialist Contexts

Reimagining Utopias

Provincializing the Worldly Citizen examines travel to Czechoslovakia by Yugoslav educators and students in the 1920s and 1930s in the context of educational modernization and national identity formation. It argues that «Slavic Cosmopolitanism» was an important element in educating the Yugoslav child and in the development of schooling practices in Yugoslavia. The book examines how notions of «Slavicness» circulated and were related to visions of the ideal Yugoslav, linking together these two concerns - not merely to cross-fertilize Slavic studies, the history of education, and the field of comparative education but as part of an effort to develop new intellectual strategies for transnational, cross-cultural scholarship. To this end, it examines Yugoslav student and teacher travel as an entry point to analyzing the regulative ideals that were inscribed in the Yugoslav child as a future citizen. From the broadest perspective, the book offers ways of thinking about the functions of travel and schooling by exposing the fabricated categories of ethnicity and nation as they become worked into cultural and pedagogical ideals. In specific terms, it is an examination of how interwar Yugoslav schools produced worldly minded Yugoslavs - not just through the official curriculum but across a wide range of cultural practices.

Noah W. Sobe

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