New Year’s Frog

Nelli Piattoeva was born and raised in the Westernmost part of the USSR and continued her education across the border in Finland where she currently lives and researches different aspects of post-Soviet educational transformations including digitalization, national assessments, and nationalism. Studying childhood memories and lived experiences of (post)socialism, she seeks to understand how state policies are enacted―absorbed, resisted or ignored―by adults and children on the ground. She also feels a strong need for more research on childhood, including children’s relational agency, in educational sociology and policy studies that tend to predominantly focus on policies and adults’ experiences thereof. She has found great inspiration and comfort in engaging with artistic methods and collective biography through collaboration with and friendship of Zsuzsa Millei and Iveta Silova as the Mnemo ZIN collective.