Together with colleagues prof. Marc Brightman (University College London) and prof. Vanessa Grotti (European University Institute) I have organised a double panel »A Return to Life: Anthropologies of Regeneration, Resurgence and Visions of the Future« at at 117th meeting of the American Anthropological Association in San Jose (California), where 14 professional anthropologists have presented their work. I have presented the work and the results of our research group, focusing on my fieldwork done in Serbia. The paper discussed the complaints of many Serbs that they feel they are running on empty, that they are exhausted from everything that has been happening to them over the past 30 years. They claim that people’s lassitude and feelings of being stuck are down to their country’s ‘political and mental ecology’, an environment they describe as impure, stagnant and treacherous. The paper looked at how do people who think of their past and present temporal experiences as doomed, imagine their future? How are personal and collective futures understood as inevitable, or elusive, or recalcitrant struggling into being? To answer these questions I have ethnographically focused on a range of Serbs who actively and often innovatively respond to the notion that the time they live in requires a real and pragmatic restructuring and healing of people's social, economic and political ways of living. In imagining and producing a different future these respondents hope to bring good, not only to themselves, but also to the general public. The paper has thus explores the figure of a visionary, asking what practices and what characteristics make and embody a figure of a visionary and a well-doer in contemporary Serbia? By studying the power of imagination in engaged creative practices of envisioning the future, the paper aims to look at, the concepts such as ‘precariousness’, ‘exhaustion’, ‘responsibility’, ‘care’, ‘creativity’ and ‘regeneration’, hopefully dislocating the typical range of images and moral connotations that these concepts carry.
B.01 Organiser of a scientific meeting
COBISS.SI-ID: 43930157PI and the researcher on this project, Nataša Gregorič Bon, co-organised a one-day workshop on Water Routes and Future. The workshop was part of the children's Research Playground that the ZRC SAZU organises for the past thirteen years. The Research Playground aims to popularise and promote the scientific research amongst the young, elementary school population. The workshop on Water routes and on Visions of the Future playfully interrogated the meanings of water in the daily life of people living in Albania, Serbia and Slovenia. Through various activities such as drawing, playing, discovering, we have been extensively questioning the visions of the future.
D.10 Educational activities
COBISS.SI-ID: 41912109As part of his pedagogical work at the University of Ljubljana, our colleague Miha Kozorog, has on the basis of the research project Seizing the Future (ARRS J6-7480), designed a research project for students of ethnology and cultural anthropology, entitled “Young Entrepreneurs in Slovenia: Between Necessity and Vision, Between the Search and Creation of the Future”. Over the past three years the students have ethnographically explored various aspects of the “social” and “start-up” entrepreneurial culture in Slovenia. The first student survey started in October 2016 and ended in January 2017; the second one started in February 2018 and ended in June 2018. Approximately 80 students were actively involved; each interviewed a selected young entrepreneur and collected basic information about the conditions of her/his operation. Most of the participating students prepared a report on the work and mindset of the selected young entrepreneur, with an emphasis on their perception and making of the future.The students have conducted fieldwork in different parts of Slovenia, which provided seminal data for the Seizing the Future project. All researchers on the project have been involved, at some stage, in working with/teaching of the students.
D.10 Educational activities
The paper was part of the international anthropological conference 'On Thinking, Crafting and Seizing the Future', organised by the PI and dr. Pirjo K. Virtanen, at the University of Helsinki in February 2018. The paper focused on certain social entrepreneurs in contemporary Albania, who relate to their individual and national future(s) by mobilising and transforming that what is taken as a ‘conventional’ Albanian mindset (Albanian mentaliteti). The paper asks what is mentaliteti and how it relates to the entrepreneurial subjectivities, their strategies and plans? In addressing these questions, the author explains why these particular entrepreneurs (self-declared ‘dreamers’ and ‘inspirers’) conceive Albanian mindset as the main obstacle in planning their futures. By doing so, the presentation will look at the dynamic relationship that notions of the family and kinship have for conceptions of the past, the present and the future. What is it that visionary strategists in contemporary Albania would like to mobilise and what to transform? What pasts seem to be spilling over their present(s) and what presents(s) are holding back their future(s)? Through examining the concept of mentaliteti the paper attempts to provide an anthropological understanding of the various temporal implications that seem to be engendered in the notions of the kinship, family and in the processes of planning.
B.03 Paper at an international scientific conference
COBISS.SI-ID: 42655021Based on the field research among social entrepreneurs and various initiators, that aim at the social change in Slovenia, the paper explored labour market, personal and social transformations in relation to experiences and visions of the future. Author’s particular interest was in tracking and evaluating various social change initiators, so called social experimentators. Social transformation (as understood by author’s interlocutors) implies self-transformation; by changing ourselves, our ways of life, embodied norms and attitudes, we create different structure and conditionality. It is believed that by living a different present, we create a different future, the future that is otherwise unimaginable.
B.03 Paper at an international scientific conference
COBISS.SI-ID: 3731828