Deadline: November 1, 2025
CONCEPT
Children are caught up in wars and conflicts initiated and fought by adults. This is the inherent global practice of politico-social power asymmetries. The pages of human history show how strongly the Holocaust and the Second World War, as well as the wars and conflicts of long duration still being waged, have left their mark on children. This volume focuses on Eastern and Southeastern European discourses and memory policies about the extermination of Jewish (and to some extent non-Jewish) children and connects these phenomena with diverse cultures of remembrance before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The main research questions we ask are:
- How were forms of memory of child victims of the Holocaust, child courage and resistance shaped in the post-war period in the context of Eastern and Southeastern European discourses and cultures of memory?
- How are these themes preserved, cultivated and transmitted in education, art and culture in material and virtual spaces?
- What kind of memorial places and spaces relating to children in the Holocaust, wars and conflicts have been created, commemorated, and what does memory (as sensitive category in research) look like nowadays at the intersection of Eastern, Southeastern and Western discourses in the European context?
By inviting researchers from eastern and southeastern parts of Europe (non-dominant in this discourse so far) to collaborate and contribute to this book, we are creating a space for the academic exchange of ideas, content, positions of specialists of their own contexts, for whom the history of children in the Holocaust (and not only) is frequently the history of generational experience and heritage. It should be noted that this is often the story of their childhood, education, socio-political context and the story of where they came from, and sometimes where they belong.
Our goal is to deal with difficult knowledge about children in the Holocaust and to deconstruct and reproduce knowledge (with access to original knowledge sources) with missing voices and narrations from historical discourses and memories in Eastern and Southeastern Europe. We put the historical narrations, old and new meanings concerning memories and voices on the intersection of practice and science. Doing so, we attempt to bridge the gap covered by the veil of silence concerning the regions we are researching – East and Southeastern Europe – with the voices of native researchers and a sensitive diverse group such as children and sensitive research categories: discourses and memories in the Holocaust and WW II as a sensitive context. Through this volume, we seek to develop a more comprehensive understanding and theorisation of the connections between past and present in historical, social and educational discourses. The task of the book is to show the power of narratives, discourses and historical explanations from Eastern and South-Eastern Europe on the situation, contexts of the lives of children affected by the Holocaust and war. 6.4.2025 We want to show the importance of the power of humanizing methodologies, narratives and historical discourses in different temporal orientations and regions realized and deconstructed in contemporary science.
Deadline for articles: 1. November 2025
Language: English. We assume that the manuscript has been proof-read by a native-speaker before you deliver it for peer-review.
Length: The final draft of a manuscript of a regular article accepted for publication should be ca. 40,000 characters in length including footnotes (ca. 15 pages; max. 20 pages).
Please send inquiries to: u.markowska-ma@uw.edu.pl