A history of care practices in central and eastern Europe
How have care practices changed across different peoples, states and political economies during the dynamic 20th century? And how did caretakers rooted in families, communities and broader societies nurture very young children during their earliest and most precarious months? The CareCentury project answers these entangled questions with a comparative study of early childcare in central and eastern Europe between 1905-2004.
What we do
CareCentury, or “A Century of Care: Invisible Work and Early Childcare in central and eastern Europe, 1905-2004,” is a research project supported by the European Research Council and based at Leiden University in The Netherlands. Our team studies how early childcare practices changed and persisted over time in central and eastern Europe across the 20th century. Why, you might ask, does early childcare matter?
Questions about early childcare, like all great historical questions are both timeless and contingent. All of us and all humans beings in the past received care in the womb and during the first two years of life. Care that, in fact, we cannot remember.
CareCentury begins from this universal foundation and explores how care practices focused on the very young changed across different families, communities, states and political economies in the past. Our team studies care practices, like feeding, diapering, cleaning, playing and nurturing by identifying unique voices, spaces and things that can help us visualize the invisible work of caretaking, which by it’s nature is difficult to observe.
The rapidly changing political economies within central and eastern Europe across one century, from 1905-2004, serve as the dynamic laboratory for CareCentury. We begin in the diverse Habsburg Empire and chart care across six of its successor states, from Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland to Hungary, Romania and Yugoslavia. We draw from a variety of methods and linguistic expertise to identify a novel polyglot source base that will make this large space, this long chronology and this diversity of people come alive in innovative ways. We lean on the conceptual idea of the “care-taking regime,” which we define as a combination of moral assumptions, medical philosophies as well as material and technological innovations. In sum, our research will show how these regimes coalesced and interacted with ethnic traditions, religious sensitivities and folklore to impact the provision of care in this particular past.
CareCentury makes care across the first 1,000 days of human life matter as a scientific historical concept that resonates in other contexts and intersects with other narratives: like narratives about family, gender, medicine, labor, space, materiality, nationalism, socialism, liberalism and, of course, the modern experience within eastern and central Europe.
