Cold War Toys: Material Cultures of Childhood in Argentina

Cold War Toys: Material Cultures of Childhood in Argentina is an AHRC-funded project, which will run between February 2022 and January 2024. The project is based at the Department of Communication and Media (School of the Arts) at the University of Liverpool, and is under the direction of Dr Jordana Blejmar (PI), Senior Lecturer in Visual Media and Cultural Studies.  

Cold War Toys provides a cultural, political and affective history of Argentine toys during the Cold War, specifically between the emergence of Peronism in the 1940s and the end of the last civic-military dictatorship in 1983. The project analyses the production, circulation, consumption, value and meaning of toys as historical documents and cultural icons. Research questions include: How did political struggles influence the design, commercialisation, advertising and consumption of playthings in Cold War Latin America? What role did toys play in movements for social change, populist governments and authoritarian regimes? And what role do toys, souvenirs, crafts and other everyday objects play today in the collective remembrance of traumatic pasts in the region?

Cold War Toys brings together museums, sites of memory, collectors, artists, curators, educators, practitioners and academics via a series of public engagement activities, including an exhibition at the Parque de la Memoria and a series of workshops at the Espacio Memoria y Derechos Humanos (ex-ESMA), both based in Buenos Aires.

For all the information on the project and upcoming events, please visit the project’s website.

This project is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)

Project Reference: AH/W002043/1