Conference report (Belgrade): Working Group 3 "Transformation of Politics"
Co-authored by Sara Jones and Maija Spurina
The working group on slow transformation of politics met in three sessions. This time our meetings were focused on various projects that our groups had been working on. The co-chairs of the group Sara Jones and Maija Spurina and leaders of each activity reported on the progress of each project and we all discussed how to proceed further. The projects discussed were: two sets of educational materials; the 8th of March project that will result in both a contribution to the action wide virtual exhibition and a podcast episode; a working paper on slow memory of religion; and a special issue on Slow Memory and the City.
One set of educational materials that our group has prepared is led by Sara Jones in collaboration with WG3 members Ewa Tartakowsky and Julian Hoerner, and their colleagues at the University of Birmingham. The aim of these resources is to help teachers and students embed the experiences of the Second World War and the Holocaust in Europe’s East into their teaching and learning. There are two competitions associated with the resources, one for students over the age of 16 in secondary-level education in any country, and one for teachers or teachers-in-training in the UK. The development of the other set of resources is led by Vayia Karaiskou (University of Cyprus). These are visual literacy tools targeted at diverse audiences aiding exploration of our perceptions and workings of memory, unlocking new possibilities for research, innovation, and societal understanding.
We also discussed an upcoming working paper on religion and slow memory authored by Kim Groop. It was decided to develop a dialogical collaborative working paper based on Kim’s work, where several group members will respond to Kim’s paper on religion from the perspective of their own research.
A separate session was dedicated to the 8th of March Project, a project that was born in the previous action meeting in Aarhus, where we realized that the 8th of March is an eventless commemorative date that has very diverse meanings. Over the year we have collected a set of images from various national contexts, as well as recorded statements by the action members of what the 8th of March means to them or to people around them.
The final session was dedicated to the upcoming special issue on Slow Memory and the City, edited by Gruia Badescu, Maija Spurina, and Christian Wicke. The group discussed potential journals for the special issue and set up the working plan on how to proceed.
Besides thes working group sessions we all took part in action wide events. Some ofour group members have reflected on the insights gained in these various sessions:
Maija Spurina (Latvian Academy of Culture, Latvia): “From the very dense and truly exciting program, for me the most thought-provoking events were Igor Stik’s lecture (which was part of the training school), and most notably his statement about western constructed post-socialist subject in 1990s who was not supposed to speak, but only to listen, not supposed to design, but only to implement, not supposed to think, but only to learn; not to supposed to act, but only to follow. I also enjoyed the visit to the Museum of Yugoslavia that is also a Josip Broz Tito memorial. Coming from the Baltics, the Serbian view of Tito’s Yugoslavia in a positive light was hard to grasp, and made me realize how differently Yugoslavian and Soviet socialism was experienced and is now remembered.”
Johanna Vollmeyer (Complutense University of Madrid, Spain): “It was striking to attend the guided walking tour to NATO memorials from the Yugoslavian War and talk to the guide and her colleagues about the 1990s events. Seeing the reactions of some local people in the street on what our guide told us, and graffitis like “The only Genocide was against the Serbs” makes me think that the Balkans is still a powder keg with a cold peace that can convert into a conflict very quickly again.”
Ewa Tartakowsky (CNRS, France) : Among all the exciting activities I attended during the annual meeting in Belgrade, the one that intrigued me the most was the memory walk on graffiti and memory on the walls with Sofija Todorović. We discovered various types of public uses of the past, ranging from simple tags with political resonance to the creation of murals funded by institutional sources. Clearly, these varied uses are very engaging, relatively widespread, and highly political—as evidenced, for example, by those advocating for the return of Kosovo to Serbia. It is interesting to note that this practice of inscribing political history on the walls, as well as the practices of contesting these messages and representations, are situated in well-defined locations—some kind of memory battlegrounds—but all stem from civil society, even though it seems largely polarized. The Serbian case is, in this respect, an interesting point of comparison for this type of public use of history on the walls in Poland, which I am studying. It offers both similarities in terms of political content and differences in terms of the range of references and degrees of politicization. I must finally admit that the meeting in Belgrade also allowed me to become aware of the very existence of Taylor Swift—showing that research on the past is always connected to the present.”
