ISRF Mid-Career Fellow 2023-24
ISRF Mid-Career Fellow 2023-24
Ana Dević is a political and cultural sociologist who obtained her Ph.D. from the University of California at San Diego. She is currently an associate researcher at KU Leuven, where she was previously a Marie Sklodowska-Curie fellow. Ana is an adjunct associate professor with the University of Bologna Eastern and Southeast European Studies. In 2022-2023 she is a resident research fellow with the grant at the Royal Academy Netherlands Institute of Advanced Studies in Amsterdam. Ana specializes in nationalism, socialism and postsocialism, social movements, gender, memory politics and arts activism. Her recent publications include ‘Class, Conflict, and Power between Hegemony and Critical Knowledge’ (2022) and ‘Hijacked Feminism of the New Right in Serbia’ (2021).
What role do commemorations play in the construction of collective memory in places afflicted by extreme war violence? How do such commemorations create or hinder durable peace? And to what extent can the inclusion of non-official, grassroots commemorations and bottom-up initiatives more broadly, stimulate more inclusive forms of remembrance? These questions will be explored through a research project that focuses on the crucial case of the former Yugoslavia. The project zooms in on the sites of extreme war atrocity in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia and Croatia: Srebrenica, Prijedor, Vukovar, Knin, Glina, Jasenovac, and Batajnica. At these critical post-war sites nationalist elites regularly evoke competitive victimhood to inflame the “enemy” images, mixing the memories of WWII, the socialist period, and the atrocities of the 1990s. These nationalist mobilizations form an obstacle to inclusive citizenship and durable peace. The overall aim is to create a map of alternative/ oppositional commemorations existing in these contexts, and explore their possibilities to form a viable, more inclusive alternative to the formal institutionalized (state) commemorations. Grassroots commemorations will be examined as social movement activities (studying their mobilizational capacity and significance) that seek recognition and justice for victims of the “enemy” side. The project’s unique micro-level participatory approach unravels the tangible as well as virtual efforts at seeking active forms of memory, involving regular citizens in their relationship to the war past, interacting with polarizing political forces. Through a specific lens – of artistic activism – the project also examines visual and virtual interactive approaches to memory, where activists redefine the spaces where war atrocities took place in innovative and striking ways, reclaiming them as inclusive places of memory. The project relies on conceptual frames and methods from sociological and political research, on the one hand, and humanities (cultural studies/ media studies, memory studies, engaged art) on the other.
If you would like to contact any of our Fellows to discuss their ISRF-funded work, please contact Dr Lars Cornelissen (Academic Editor) in the first instance, at [email protected].