Archieven: Events

Maria Todorova is Professor of History at the The University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. Her ground-breaking work published twenty years ago, Imagining the Balkans deals with the region’s inconsistent (but usually negative) image inside Western culture, as well as with the paradoxes of cultural reference and its assumptions. In this book Todorova develops a theory of Balkanism as a region geographically inextricable from Europe, yet culturally constructed as “the other” that has often served as a repository of negative characteristics upon which a positive and self-congratulatory image of the “European” has been built. With this work, Maria Todorova offers a timely, accessible study of how an innocent geographic appellation was transformed into one of the most powerful and widespread pejorative  designations in modern history.

In Eastern European and Central Asian countries women are banned by law from hundreds of professions, including prestigious and high-paying ones. This open discrimination against women in the working world is explained as “concern for reproductive health.” On the occasion of the International Worker’s day Stefania Kulaeva, the executive director of ADC Memorial, tells about this relict of the Soviet era and efforts to cancel it.

Stefania Kulaeva – is a head of ADC Memorial (adcmemorial.org) – an organization promoting minorities rights and opposing all forms of discrimination. Since 2000 Stefania has been advocating for minorities rights in Russia and in other Eastern European countries. Stefania writes regularly for Radio Svoboda.

This panel will feature five doctoral students who carry out their doctoral research with Rozita Dimova as their supervisor. The students will outline their individual projects and also engage in a conversation on doing interdisciplinary research in gender studies, anthropology, art and history with focus on materiality, aesthetics and politics:

Atdhe Hetemi (3rd year) is doing his PhD in East European Languages and Cultures with a thesis entitled STUDENTS FOR KOSOVO: 1968-1999.

Marius Janusauskas (1st year) started his PhD in January 2018 in Gender and Diversity with a thesis entitled MULTIPLE MASCULINITIES. Contemporary Flemish Fashion.

Hasan Isikli (5th year) is doing his PhD in Theater and Performance Studies with a thesis entitled AWARENESS OF PLACE: An anthropological research of memory and identity of Izmir city and the International Izmir Festival.

Golnesa Rezanezhad Pishkhani (2nd year) is doing doing her PhD research in Gender and Diversity with a thesis entitled “KILIM” as a Visual Medium Under Contemporary Social-Cultural Concerns. Female-artisans and Hand-woven Carpet in Iran:  An artistic participatory project.

Anna Zadrozna (5th year) is enrolled as a doctoral student in the Department of Anthropology at Oslo University. The title of her project is: “TURKISHNESS” ACROSS THE BORDERS: POLITICS, PRACTICES, MEMORIES AND BELONGINGS. Transnational Ethnography among Macedonian-speaking Muslims.

Balkan Traffic Festival

Much has been said in recent years on the need for new visions on Europe as a common project for the future, a discourse that has been even more accentuated after Brexit and political developments in Central-Eastern Europe. The purpose of this debate is to show yet another Europe, where reality is shaped by other centers of influence and visions on past and future. The idea is to initiate an open dialogue between East and West and give a space for viewpoints from Europe that might seem far away to many Belgians and Western Europeans. What vision on the European project do artists’ citizens from the Balkans have? What stories about Europe, as a political project but also as a cultural common history, can be told from this side of the continent? How can these be integrated into a common future? Taking as a starting point the work of three urban performers, as spokespersons from their cities, the panel will feature Frenkie (BiH), Marcelo (Serbia) & 12 0S Phytikos (Greece) in dialogue with Genoveva Ruiz-Calavera from DG NEAR D – Western Balkans (Directorate-General for Neighbourhood and Enlargement Negotiations of the European Commission). Rozita Dimova from Ghent University will moderate the debate.

Marlene Schäfers holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge, UK  (2016), and is currently a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellow at the Department of Conflict and Development Studies in Ghent. Marlene specializes in the anthropology of modern Turkey and its Kurdish regions.  In the SEELAB interview we will discuss Marlene’s project on death as a potent site of political engagement and social (re)generation, as well as the politics of death that unfolds around fallen fighters of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). How is it to do research on death and dying, as the Kurdish political movement and its supporters venerate fallen guerrilla fighters as martyrs who have heroically sacrificed their lives for the Kurdish people? What are the challenges in analysing the role of the Turkish state that ferociously seeks to prevent such veneration, mobilizing enormous resources in the attempt at killing not just guerrillas’ biological bodies but also their martyrial afterlives? What makes the afterlives of these guerrilla fighters so potent to attract such intense reactions by the Turkish state, and how does their potency radiate into political and intimate lives? These are only few of the questions that will be part of our conversation with Marlene as we discuss the danger and challenges of conducting anthropological fieldwork in war-torn regions.

Laila Ben Allal (CNN), Herman Van Goethem (Universiteit Antwerpen), Rozita Dimova (UGent), Anya Topolski (Universiteit Nijmegen)

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