Codruta Pohrib is one of the two recipients of the IRSCL Research Award 2015 (€1,250) for a proposed small research project ‘Writing Childhoods/Righting Memory’, which is part of her dissertation on post-communist remembrances of Romanian communist childhoods across media. She received the grant during the Award Ceremony at the 22nd Biennial Congress of IRSCL held at the University of Worcester, UK, 8-12 August 2015.
Codruta Pohrib’s doctoral research traces the multiple discourses that foreground the trope of communist childhood in post-communist Romania, using it to different, at times divergent, ends. More specifically, she is interested in disentangling the ways in which cultural constructions of childhood are used in post-communist Romania by various memory actors to support and advance memory politics agendas and to capitalize on childhood nostalgia as a marketing tool. ‘Writing Childhoods/Righting Memory’ is a project nested in the broader research and focuses on constructions of childhood in autobiographical texts and educational materials.
Its interest lies with the ethics of remembering and it aims to answer questions about intergenerational transmission of memory: Is nostalgia for the childhood self an ethically correct approach given the communist background which it also almost unavoidably tinges with the feeling? What sort of biographical stories should the young generation learn from? What resources are made available to them and what are the ideological underpinnings of these sources?
