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Vjollca Krasniqi (University of Prishtina)

Abstract

This presentation focuses on urban life at the fringe of Prishtina, the capital city of Kosovo. It discusses the histories, practices, and processes of urban transformation and marginality and how urban margins have evolved in the post-war and post-socialist contexts of the city centre. Grounded in the framework of large-scale political transformations, including post-socialism, post-war, and state-building processes, it explores their impact on urbanisation. In particular, it examines urban sprawl as a result of informal and ‘un-designed’ urbanism, providing an impetus for myriad urban scapes. These not only profoundly shape the urban social fabric, but also give rise to conflicting narratives and imaginations of city life. Adopting a critical lens on the dialectic of center-periphery and the production of scapes in Prishtina’s contested public spaces it demonstrates tensions, conflict, and contestation accompanying the urban sprawl - a by-product of the neoliberal economy - and the dynamics of post-socialist and post-war urban life in Prishtina and Kosovo as a whole.

Bio

Dr. Vjollca Krasniqi is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Philosophy, and Faculty of Arts, at the University of Prishtina. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Ljubljana, an M.Sc. degree in Gender, Development, and Globalization from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), and a BA degree in Philosophy and Sociology from the University of Prishtina. Her main research interests are gender, nation-building, collective memory, post-war justice, and human rights. She has been teaching at the University of Prishtina, Faculty of Philosophy courses on research methods, contemporary sociological theories, ethics, gender studies, and human rights. Currently, she also teaches at the Faculty of Arts at the University of Prishtina courses on gender studies and sociology of art. She was a visiting scholar at Dartmouth College, US (2016). She is the co-founder of the University Program for Gender Studies and Research (2013-) and also served as the co-chair (2014-2018). She is a member of the steering committee of the Memory Studies Association Regional Group South East Europe (2020-). She is the co-chair of the Working Group on Training and Capacity Building of the COST Action Slow Memory (2021-). She serves on the boards of Humanitarian Law Center Kosovo (2019-), and Atifete Jahjaga Foundation (2018-), and is the chair of the Board of Directors of Save the Children Kosovo (2021-). She has worked on numerous projects on gender issues and has been active in the women’s movement in the Balkans.