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This paper examines the role of students in the newly founded Czechoslovakia in the 1920s, focusing on dormitories for destitute university students in Prague. It explores how students were perceived as the future of the democratic state, and the everyday manifestations and practical consequences of this perception. Drawing on Serge Moscovici’s theory of social representations, especially the process of anchoring, the paper analyses how students were linked to representations of the public and the state. It traces this mechanism across three levels: everyday communication, student  artwork, and the construction of a monumental dormitory for the poor. The final case shows how patriotic reasoning attached to students’ significance overrode economic rationality and produced a costly building that the poorest students could not afford. By linking these examples through a shared anchoring mechanism, the article demonstrates how large-scale developments can be rooted in everyday interactions and suggests that Moscovici’s framework is a productive way of connecting “small” and “big” histories.
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Jana Kynkorova is a final-year doctoral student at Charles University in Prague. Her research focuses on student culture in Prague during the first half of the twentieth century. Alongside her doctoral work, she studies flute performance at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, with a particular focus on twentieth-century repertoire. Her academic background is in art history, and her current research brings together these disciplines to explore new ways of understanding student life, including imagination, modes of thought, conflicts, long-term relationships, processes of remembering, and meaning-making.

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