This project offers a close look into the meaning-making practices of the Bulgarian socialist state with regard to the conception and enactment of childhood. Held for the first time in 1979, on occasion of the UN declared "International Year of the Child", the International Children's Assembly "Banner of Peace" emerges as a focal point of Bulgaria's cultural management in the 1970s. The Assembly exhibits the conceptual tension between the aesthetic-humanist ideas characterizing Bulgarian culture of that period and traditional socialist discourse. To examine this process, I employ a diachronic analysis of the rationale, enactment, and significance of the Children's Assembly, paying attention to the ambivalent images of the child embedded in its model. In light of the peculiar status of socialist children as future builders of the new regime, my work foregrounds the discursive and embodied strategies which reinterpret and "perform" the child within the Assembly format. I particularly trace the ideological appropriation of childhood, as presented in the "Banner of Peace" initiative, into the symbolic repertoire of the Bulgarian Pioneer Organization. Based on archival research and ethnographic fieldwork, this project formulates new insights into the conceptual utility of the child for state discourse, providing specific explanations of socialist nostalgia in the Bulgarian context. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com.bibliotheek.ehb.be/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]