We kindly inform you that on Wednesday, June 11, 2025, at 12:00 PM, Adriana Sabo will publicly defend her doctoral dissertation as part of the third-cycle doctoral study programme Comparative Study of Ideas and Cultures, module Cultural History. The title of the dissertation is:

“Me Fancy, You Nothing”: Mechanisms of Producing the Empowered Femininity within the Contemporary Balkan Music Industry.

Abstract of the dissertation.

Supervisor: Assoc. Prof. Ana Hofman, PhD

Committee: Research Fellow Mojca Kovačič, PhD, Prof. Tanja Petrović, PhD and Asst. Prof. Mojca Piškor, PhD.

The defence will be held in English in the Gosposka Hall of the Geographical Museum of GIAM ZRC SAZU, Gosposka ulica 16, Ljubljana.

You are warmly invited!

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We cordially invite you to two guest lectures at Interdisciplinary study of institutions and society in the 21st century module by Prof. Werner Bonefeld, PhD.

Tuesday, 3 June 2025 at 4:00 PM:

Money and its Power.

The session examines the money form of capitalist wealth. It argues that the satisfaction of needs is secondary to the requirement of making money out of money. In this context, it explores capital as a process of making money out of money, argues that in capitalism time is money, and examines the corporeality of its power. In capitalism money rules – what cannot be exchanged for money is worthless. Why, how, and with what consequence?

Wednesday, 4 June 2025 at 4:00 PM:

Economic Compulsion and the Critique of Suffering.

Marxʼs overriding concern in his critique of political economy is the conceptualization of the capitalist social relations. He asks, »What is necessary and unavoidable in a given production system?« For Adorno, capitalism is most perceptible where it hurts. He turns towards human suffering as the key to comprehending capitalism’s social reality. My concern is not whether Adorno’s turn towards human suffering is core to his negative dialectics and whether Marx is a logician of the capitalist social nature. My concern is rather in reading what Marx calls his ‘critique of the entire system of economic categories’ through Adorno’s determinate negation. The term economic compulsion’ lends itself to this reading.

Both lectures will be held in English in the Gosposka Hall ZRC SAZU, Gosposka ulica 16, Ljubljana.

Werner Bonefeld is Emeritus Professor in the Department of Politics at the University of York, UK, and Adjunct Professor at the Postgraduate School ZRC SAZU (Ljubljana, Slovenia). He teaches Contemporary Critical Theory in Western Marxian Thought at the University of Peking. Recent book publications include Adorno and Marx, which he co-edited with Chris O’Kane, and A Critical Theory of Economic Compulsion (Routledge, 2023). With Chris O’Kane, he is co-editor of Bloomsbury’s Critical Theory and the Critique of Society series.

Welcome!

You are kindly invited to the presentation of doctoral dissertation topics as part of the requirements for Independent Research Work within the third-cycle doctoral study program Comparative Studies of Ideas and Cultures.

On Friday, April 25, 2025, at 4:00 PM, as part of the module Interdisciplinary Study of Institutions and Society in the 21st Century, Krešimir Dabo, PhD will present the topic of his second doctoral dissertation titled:

Art and Artists between Clickbait and Criticism: Media Narratives in the Contemporary Digital Environment.

(Presentation summary)

Proposed supervisor: Full Prof. Dr. Marina Gržinić Mauhler.

Committee: Assist. Prof. Dr. Nina Cvar (Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana), Assist. Prof. Dr. Boris Kern (ZRC SAZU), and Research Fellow Dr. Uroš Kranjc (Postgraduate School ZRC SAZU and ZRC SAZU).

The presentation will take place in the conference room of ZRC SAZU, Novi trg 2, 1st floor, Ljubljana.

Attendance is mandatory for all students enrolled in the Comparative Studies of Ideas and Cultures doctoral program as part of fulfilling the requirements for Research Seminar I (Year 1) and Research Seminar II (Year 2). Attendance will be recorded via a sign-in sheet.

All other interested parties are also warmly invited!

We invite you to a series of public lectures organised as part of the doctoral module Cultural History by the Postgraduate School ZRC SAZU and the Institute of Culture and Memory Studies ZRC SAZU. The third lecture in the series will feature Ksenija Bogetić Pejović as a guest speaker:

Language, conceptualization and collective memory in (perma)crisis.

The talk will focus on the role of collective memory in contemporary public discourses of new crises, bringing together frameworks of linguistic metaphor study, crisis communication and memory studies. Across three small case studies, set across different types of political and citizen discourse, the talk looks at instrumentalizations of conflict memory in the (post-)2020 discourses of the ‘new normal’ in former Yugoslav states. The results are used to discuss particular linguistic patterns of a growing militarization of discourse yet paralleled by intense negotiations over collective pasts and futures.

The lecture will be held in English on Thursday, April 10, 2025, at 4:00 PM in the meeting room of the Institute of Culture and Memory Studies, ZRC SAZU, Trg francoske revolucije 7, 2nd floor, Ljubljana (doorbell: ZRC SAZU).

Ksenija Bogetić Pejović is a linguist dealing with interactions of language and the social world at the  Institute of Culture and Memory Studies ZRC SAZU. Her work draws on the traditions of sociolinguistics, discourse analysis and cognitive linguistics to explore how social identities and ideologies are discursively constructed and sustained, with a particular focus on anglophone and post-Yugoslav societies. Her interests include language ideology, language and nationalism, language, gender and sexuality, youth and digital media, and metaphor.

Kindly invited!

Photo by Gabi Santana

We invite you to a series of public lectures organised as part of the doctoral module Cultural History by the Postgraduate School ZRC SAZU and the Institute of Culture and Memory Studies ZRC SAZU. The second lecture in the series will feature Tamara Banjeglav as a guest speaker:

Peace Process in Collective Memory of the 1990s War in Croatia.

This lecture examines how peaceful reintegration of Croatia’s Danube region is today publicly remembered and what role it plays in collective memory of the 1991 – 1995 war in Croatia. In the lecture, I attempt to move the attention from research on the memory of violent events during conflict and to focus on the memory of a peaceful process in the aftermath of violence.

The 1990s war in Croatia ended with military operations, but the final integration of the occupied territory into Croatia’s constitutional and legal framework was achieved with a peace process and by signing a peace agreement. However, I argue that, in post-war Croatia, public remembrance of the war includes only violent episodes from the war and marginalises public memory of peace. This has created an impression that alternatives to violence were and are not possible, although a non-violent, peaceful solution proved exactly the opposite by playing a crucial role in ending the conflict. I am to expose the mechanisms behind the marginalization of both the peace agreement and the peace-building process in different memory politics and practices and to show how this cultural continuity of seeing conflicts as necessarily and inevitably violent leads to normalisation of violence in public space and discourse.

The lecture will be held in English on Thursday, 13 March 2025, at 16:00, in the meeting room of ZRC SAZU (1st floor, Novi trg 2, Ljubljana).

Tamara Banjeglav is a research associate at the Institute of Culture and Memory Studies at the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts. She holds the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions ERA fellowship, in the framework of which she is conducting research on the project “Time is (not) on my side: Remembering victims of slow violence in a post-conflict and post-disaster setting”. She has received her PhD degree from the University of Graz, Austria. Her research interests fall within the fields of memory studies, peace and conflict studies, nationalism studies, and transitional justice, particularly in the post-Yugoslav space.

Photo by Polina Tankilevitch

We kindly inform you that on Thursday, 12 December 2024, at 1 PM, as part of the doctoral study programme Comparative Studies of Ideas and Cultures, Cultural History module, Vita Zalar will publicly defend her doctoral dissertation titled:

Anti-Roma Racism and Punitive Governance in the Habsburg and Yugoslav Monarchies, 1848–1941.

Abstract of the dissertation.

Supervisor: Prof. Oto Luthar, PhD

Co-supervisor: Prof. Ari Joskowicz, PhD

Committee: research fellow Martin Pogačar, PhD, research fellow Christian Promitzer, PhD, and Assoc. Prof. Petra Svoljšak, PhD.

The defence will be held in English in the Gosposka Hall of the Geographical Museum, Gosposka ulica 16, Ljubljana.

You are warmly invited!

We invite you to a guest lecture by Assoc. Prof. Dr. Yulia Demyanchuk:

Linguopolitical Synergetics: Formation and Research Prospects.

The report is dedicated to a new linguistic field, linguopolitical synergetics, including its subject, object, and research areas. The research’s novelty is determined by identifying five main spheres of linguopolitical synergetic studies: synergetic, linguistic, communicative, social, and military. It is determined that the fundamental components of linguopolitical synergetics involve the integration of several disciplines, including linguosynergetics, political linguistics, sociolinguistics, wartime communication, military conflict studies, and the linguistics of war. The study identifies and substantiates the subtypes of linguopolitical synergetics: macro- and microlinguopolitical synergetics, within which there have been distinguished its theoretical and experimental realms.

The lecture in English language will take place on Tuesday, 3 December 2024, at 16:00, at the ZRC SAZU conference room, Novi trg 2, 1st floor, Ljubljana.

Yulia Demyanchuk ia an associate professor at the Lviv State University of Life Safety and Ivan Franko National University of Lviv in Ukraine. She is a member of the public organization University of Leadership and Innovation in Ukraine, active member of the Ukrainian Translators Association and the Ukraine-European Scientific Cooperation Center, member of the editorial board of the academic journal Forum for Linguistic Studies, Singapore. She is also the author of over 120 scientific and methodological works, including five monographs, four textbooks, five scientific articles in international journals indexed in Scopus.

Kindly invited!

We invite you to a guest lecture, which will be held in co-organization with the Institute for Cultural and Memory Studies ZRC SAZU, within the cultural-historical doctoral module, by Mladen Zobec:

Negotiating ‘Brotherhood and Unity:’ Albanian Migrant Entrepreneurs in Socialist Slovenia.

During socialism, Albanian migrant businesses constituted the most prominent and visible example of an ethnic economy in Yugoslavia. The presence of Albanian ice-cream shops, fast-food kiosks, and bakeries became ubiquitous across the federation. Focusing on socialist Slovenia, this presentation offers a microhistory of a group of Albanian craftsmen and businessmen from Polog, Macedonia. Using oral history and archival sources, emphasis is given to the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion within Slovenian society in the broader context of Yugoslav socialism. Although Yugoslavia championed ideals of national equality, the experiences of Albanian entrepreneurs in Slovenia reveal exclusionary practices ranging from orientalist representations to harassment by the secret police. Despite discrimination, however, Albanian businesses thrived during socialism. The presentation delves into how Albanian migrants were not merely passive bystanders subjected to historical events but active agents navigating the historical political conditions. Addressing this question illuminates both the specificities of the group and the wider Yugoslav societal, political, and economic trends pertaining to socialist modernity.

The lecture in English will take place on Monday, 11 November 2024, at 1:30 PM at Križevniška dvorana, Gosposka ulica 16, Ljubljana.

Mladen Zobec is a sociologist specializing in the Balkans, with a focus on the social, political, and economic history of Yugoslavia, labor migration, ethnic migrant entrepreneurship, and socialist modernity. Currently a visiting researcher at the Institute for Cultural and Memory Studies (ZRC SAZU), he lives and works between Ljubljana and Vienna. Research for his ongoing PhD project was conducted within the FWF-supported project “To the Northwest! Intra-Yugoslav Albanian Migration (1953-1989),” led by Rory Archer at the Centre for Southeast European Studies at the University of Graz. His dissertation focuses on the “Albanian ethnic economy in socialist Slovenia (1945-1990)” and explores the lived experiences of Albanian-speaking migrant entrepreneurs during Yugoslav socialism. Additionally, he is an administrator of the Balkan Academic News (BAN) newsletter.

Kindly invited!

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