Produced in the late 1980s’ welfare-state Sweden – and thus retrospectively in the end of the Cold War – beings from other planets and artifacts related to “outer space” pop up from an archived data material consisting of 2^nd- to 3^rd-grade students’ drawings and texts produced as part of a research-based experimental education project on “Children’s life questions.” “Space beings,” “other beings,” “beings from other planets,” robots, space scientists, astronauts and spaceships populate the drawings and texts when the students were asked to reflect on the task ”What is a human being?”

The drawings and texts in question appear in the archives after the education development and research project Balil - Barns livssituation och livstolkning (Children’s living conditions and life interpretation) that took place in 1987-1990. Now stored in the cellar of Umeå University Library, the project is archived together with five other projects focusing on life questions in education, taking place from 1969/1970 to the 1990s. Besides developing pedagogical approaches and producing teaching materials in order to reform for instance religious education, a central element informing the projects was collection of data on “life questions” of “children” in schools across Sweden. In the Balil project, the research component in the form of the data collection was at the fore, the children’s texts and drawings with outer space-related content being part of this.

“Outer space” and its actors and artifacts had as metaphors and visual images been widely circulated in public debate and popular culture since the Cold-War space race following WWII sped up ‒ especially since the Soviet Union in 1958 successfully made the Sputnik satellite circulate around the earth. When the US in 1969 was able to launch the Apollo 11 and the first “man” walked on the moon, the space race further increased in the Western bloc states. In the late 1980s, “Outer space” had become an established part of children- and youth-related popular culture globally (Froelich, 2020). Also in neutral though West-leaning Sweden, a “welfare cocoon” governed by a mainly social democratically led welfare-state model as a third way between socialism and capitalism, the Cold War in the form of securitization and civil defense measures, fears of the nuclear threat and fascinations of the space race impacted social and cultural life (Cronqvist, 2012).

Like it was the case in Eastern- as well as Western-bloc states, such as Britain (Freathy et al., 2015; Wright, 2017) and the Soviet Union (Smolkin, 2018), the political interest in using “life questions” and “existential questions” as a secularized and morally oriented alternative to religious feelings and upbringing was equally strong in the welfare-state cocoons in the Nordics. This was not least the case in Sweden, where scholars from the Swedish in-service training institution for teachers since the late 1960s had worked on developing the dimension of life questions and philosophy of life, originally as a means to develop “objective” religious education, but ending up with a focus on students as individual subjects as instrumental to this.

From a history of emotions perspective (Frevert, 2011), and through the analytical concept of intra-action (Barad 2006), this paper explores to how outer space-related images and narratives can be understood within the institutional context in which they were created, within the broader welfare and warfare tensions they mirror as well as re-narrate, and as part of the negotiations of the religious/spiritual dimension in the late Cold-War period. What past future-imaginaries did the Outer Space-images produce? And what can this text-, image- and imaginaries production tell us about the emotional economy of late Cold-War welfare-state childhoods? 

The main source material for the paper are the drawings and texts produced by students in the age of 8-9 years. The sources, originally data from the experimental projects in question was produced in order to get access to the questions children posed themselves in order to integrate this into the curriculum in continuation of the comprehensive school reforms of the 1960s. Being embedded in the welfare-state school-reform, the texts, written texts and the drawings were thus produced by children on request of scholars, project staff and teachers. Rather than being “Childrens’ questions”, the texts were answers to the questions from the project staff operationalized through writing tasks and questionnaires. Hence, the text and image production should be understood as part of a broader knowledge production connected to the education political and institutional structure. However, the images and narratives produced as answers to these tasks simultaneously can be seen as expressing the priorities and interpretations of the students that created them. Inspired by Karen Barad (e.g. 2007), the texts can be understood as part of an intra-action. Operationalized in the context of this study, that means that the students’ drawings and texts are to be understood as part of a process, where the students, the drawings and texts, the contents of these texts, the written formulated tasks, the teachers who organized the text production in class, the research staff that formulated the tasks and questions, the state bodies that financed the projects and ran the schools and, finally, the central political reforms that led to the initiation and financing of the projects form intra-actional chains or circles. Within these circulations, students – as well as scholars, politicians, tasks, classroom settings, etc. – become micro-political actors, expressing and creating world views and circulating emotions (Frevert, 2011). The students are on the one hand requested to express emotions, but they are also producing them. Drawing on Haraway (1991), the students are thus on the one hand objects to making politics, but on the other hand, the subjectivity production in which they are (intra-)agents can not be parted from themselves as micro-political subjects and agencies. The paper thus builds on a history of emotions methodology that explores the role that “outer space” occupies in the images and narratives in a way which understands students as objects as well as subjects in politics transformation and production.

The questions that students answered with drawings of outer-space images were formulated by researchers invested in developing Livskunskap (Life Studies or Knowledge of Life) and taking interest in “life questions,” and thus invested in mobilizing student experiences and making them express their life world as a way to move the school curriculum from teaching “religion” to teaching “life.” This especially took the form of asking students to describe their emotions in relation to existential and moral questions such as “what is God,” “what is a human being,” “life” and “death.” Opposite written text that formed a mandatory part of the task given, drawings were mentioned in the end of the written task as an opportunity “for the ones who wanted to,” leaving traces in the archived material where 47 out of 201 responses include drawings, of which 26 include outer space-related content. Also, the outer-space content appears more manifest in the drawings than in the writings that they are accompanied by. A preliminary categorization of outer-space content in the drawings is the following: 1) Space beings showing up in comparison with human beings; 2) Space beings showing up in their own right; 3) Space beings as potential attackers and conquerors and 4) Space beings as moral correctives. Based on these preliminary findings, the paper is expected to shed light on how the intention among the researchers of moving the curricular focus from “religion” to “life” by means of “Children’s questions activated mythologies related to the space race among the students. In continuation, the paper aims to shed light on how Cold War-related metaphors were reproduced in secularity-aiming welfare-state education in the Nordics, to what extent this can be interpreted as a new kind of secular spirituality and how this follows similar patterns in other European states in the Cold Period.

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