Abstract /
Forming an increasingly popular segment of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s tourism industry, ‘war tours’ seek to educate visitors about the conflict of 1992-5. However given the passage of time, this knowledge making is increasingly reliant on interpretation as visual signs of conflict have been renovated away. This talk will explore the interpretive role of Bosnian and Herzegovinian tour guides, sharing and interrogating the stories they tell to better understand how their narratives make conflict intelligible to those without knowledge of it.
Bio /
Freya is a PhD Candidate at Central European University working on the project ‘(Still) Telling War Stories: How Bosnian and Herzegovinian Tour Guides Use ‘War Tours’ As Spaces of Contestation.’ In her thesis she explores the strategies used by tour guides to make knowledge about conflict between themselves and audiences who often have only a surface level understanding of the events of 1992-5. She takes an embodied approach to research, practicing walking ethnography, exploring the physicality of what it means to make knowledge within the tourscape. She believes everyone should go on holiday to BiH.