Maruša Pušnik held a lecture Memory Landscape in Balkan Countries: media constructions of national histories at the Ss. Cyrill and Methodius University in Skopje on October 10, 2015 for graduate students at the program Cultural studies. The lecture was held as a part of Basileus Erasmus staff exchange for the promotion of cooperation between EU and Western Balkans. In her lecture the author analyzed various politics of remembering in ex Yugoslav republics (Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia and Macedonia) and she focused on how new national politics of these states create new media representations of common past in Yugoslavia. She also showed how memorial repertoires in public spaces (from naming the streets and architecture of buildings to museums and statues) serve the national interests of building of individual and independent national histories based on forgetting of common Yugoslav past.
B.05 Guest lecturer at an institute/university
COBISS.SI-ID: 33703261This special issue contributes to the field of media anthropology which emerged as a rich and complex field of academic debate in the last three decades. The specific focus is on media rituals and practices of both representation and reception. The special issue includes international contributions on topics of banal and dramatic, serious news and media spectacles (funeral boradcats), media events and media and myth.
C.03 Guest-associated editor
This article considers one of the key recommendations of MacBride report on democratization of communication and information in the context of changed conditions of post-national European public. The notion of post-national public is defined as an ambiguous (utopian) constitution of an integrated supranational sphere of European political and cultural citizenship on the one hand, and the (actual) globalized public of individualized consumers on the other. Both aspects form an interrelated and co-dependent structure which frames the future of media democracy in relation to traditional hegemonic European public cultures. Amidst these, new transnational citizenship spaces are emerging which, by virtue of temporary, situated and contingent belongings to two or more publics, further fragment the post-national constellation. The reorganization of modern national media scapes presents a major challenge for theory of democratic communication and information and concerns a rethinking of divisions such as inclusive and exclusive deliberation, minorities and hegemonic majority, homogeneous, dialogic and poly-vocal communication. The key argument in this paper is that transnationalization and postnational disposition brings a deconstruction of semantic coherence of key concepts of media democracy; and that democratization of information irrevocably depends on the power to mobilize, instead of group will, individual desires for emancipation and utopian futures. The author concludes by indicating potential paradigmatic directions in the theory of European public sphere.
C.03 Guest-associated editor
COBISS.SI-ID: 59161698The paper examines the historical legacy of volunteers in the Spanish Civil War, with a special emphasis on the biographical portraits of female volunteers. This segment of transnational solidarity in the Spanish Civil War has not yet been submitted to an appropriate socio-historical review, although it could, according to both authors, considerably influence the contemporary discourse on global (cosmopolitan) solidarity, especially in the branch of cosmofeminist theory, which emphasises the politics of compassion and empathy. The essence of the movement of Spanish volunteers, in other words, surpassed the issue of identification with the suffering of others, although this also represented an important element of mobilisation. Nevertheless, identification was not only generally humanistic, but was political and ideational more than anything else, the evidence of which manifested itself in sacrificing one’s life for the sake of others. This perspective throws light on contemporary post-humanistic humanitarian solidarity and enables us to critically evaluate its contribution to global justice.
B.04 Guest lecture
COBISS.SI-ID: 58505314This paper investigates the conceptualization of memory as transnational cultural heritage. For the past two decades, critical memory studies, and other disciplines which include memory in their research, has been outlining the role of memory, and uses of the past, in social and cultural orchestration of collective lives in the present. Especially since the fall of the Berlin war, memory has become a primary site on which processes of reconstitution and re-articulation of identity and belonging has taken place in post-socialist Europe, whereas, in this debate, western Europe often appeared as “memory-less”; as a detached continent situated in its daily political debates entirely in the historical present, and whose memory issue has already been settled and thus implicated in post-Cold war remembering only by reference and name. However, the 2015 celebration of the end of WWII, and the tangible commitments to properly commemorate the defeat of Nazism, has uncovered also the tangibility of European memory, both in the West and East. As a matter of fact, the dormant attitude towards the recurrence of neo-Nazism, racism and xenophobic nationalism throughout the EU, has resulted in a state of discomfort and dis-orientation as concern European values.
B.03 Paper at an international scientific conference
COBISS.SI-ID: 58504546