Bosnia Remapped

This 12-month collaborative project in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) combines participatory action research with arts-based methods in the geo-humanities to implement, analyse and assess co-existence and reconciliation efforts in deeply divided societies. Bosnia Remapped realises the goals of the ISRF through the promotion of new modes of inquiry and the development of interdisciplinary expertise and methods to better understand post-conflict societies. Aims are achieved through innovative activities which explore how participatory action research and arts-based approaches can have an impact beyond academia in conflict affected societies.

The project has two aims:

1. To implement participatory arts-based approaches to peace building and reconciliation in deeply divided places;

2. To analyse and assess participatory arts-based approaches in place and to explore how they may (or may not) contribute to the building of more peaceful societies.

The project has four objectives:

1. Examine what art and design provides and what it looks, feels, and sounds like after conflict (RQ1);

2. Examine how place affects peace-formation and how place shapes art and design and is represented in art and design after conflict (RQ2);

3. Examine whether place-based arts-based approaches can be harnessed to affect societal and political change in places where conflict has had deep long-lasting impacts upon communities and individuals (RQ3);

4. Examine how place-based arts-based approaches can be analysed and understood alongside traditional methods of building peace in order to assess the impact of this creative work in place (RQ4).

The project develops four outputs and knowledge exchange activities:

a) Produce a peer-reviewed article which will be a major contribution to understanding the development of arts-based peace-building in deeply divided societies;

b) Produce a tool-kit (Bosnia Remapped);

c) Produce an atlas (A Subjective Atlas of Sarajevo);

d) Run three four-day knowledge-exchange participatory subjective mapping workshops in Sarajevo, feeding into project outputs.