The CEU Democracy Institute’s Democracy in History Workgroup launched a public lecture series to bring together international as well as local scholars of history and related fields in Budapest as well as online to exchange their results on the interplay between democracy and histor(iograph)y in a broad sense. The series’ title honors the legacy of historian Jenő Szűcs, an advocate of recognizing Central Europe as a historical region and a major critic of the misuses of national past in his native Hungary.
Abstract:
Bringing together political science and cultural memory studies, in my talk I will unravel the concept of “a normal life” within the so-called Yugonostalgic narratives of the generation of the last pioneers (born between 1974 and 1982), in three (post)Yugoslav countries: Slovenia, Croatia and Serbia. Data obtained through 62 interviews of political actors in 2017 and 2018 shows us how nostalgic memories turn into political reflections within one single narrative and how the cognitive dissonances translate into ambivalent nostalgic memory narratives and political conceptualizations of the Yugoslav past. The concept of “a normal life” defines the socialist pre-war Yugoslav past and the value-based understanding of a desirable future. Between Yugoslavism(s) and Yugonostalgia(s), “normal life” stands as a political category. As a political and an ideological concept for the future and formulated as a counter-narrative against the neoliberal ethno-national transitional present, “normal life” stems from the generational positionality of the last pioneers, regardless of their political identification. Deconstructing the understanding of “normality” in these narratives helps us better understand the construction of the past for the politically active last pioneers, as well as uncover the political ideas of seemingly nostalgic narratives, and the ways they are being ingrained in the (post)Yugoslav political programmes for the future.
Speaker:
Dr. Milica Popović (Sciences Po CERI) is a political scientist, specializing in Memory Studies, Political Sociology and Higher Education Studies. She obtained a PhD in Comparative Political Sociology at Sciences Po Paris and in Balkan studies at the University of Ljubljana. She has been Postdoctoral Fellow and Project Lead at the Global Observatory on Academic Freedom at Central European University in Vienna from 2021 to 2023, and for her work at CEU she is a recipient of DAAD Fundamental Academic Values Award for Early Career Scientists. Popović also worked as a lecturer at Sciences Po Paris. She is currently a Visegrad OSA fellow in Budapest. She has been a Visiting Fellow at the Department of Sociology at the University of Warwick and at the Institute for Contemporary History in Ljubljana. While working on her monograph on Yugonostalgia and the memory narratives of the generation of the last pioneers in the (post)Yugoslav space, she is currently developing a new research project on the memory narratives of deserters and draft resisters in Yugoslav wars of the 1990s.
Registration required for on-site as well as online participants here.
The Zoom link will be sent to those who register.