Conference “Living in the aftermaths: Trauma, politics and survival in Yugoslavia and successor states, 1945 – present”

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The conference aims to explore how war-related psychological distress was experienced, narrated, debated and reframed in Yugoslavia in the second half of the twentieth century.

It asks how the theme of wounded psyche and wartime suffering was addressed and acknowledged in political, psychiatric and broader cultural discourses of socialist Yugoslavia, and how Yugoslav citizens’ psychological experiences of extreme violence, genocide and displacement shaped the processes of postwar reconstruction and socialist state-building in the absence of an explicit language of trauma. Equally importantly, the conference asks how the broader political context of socialist revolution and war victory shaped these discourses and understandings of traumatic events.

The conference will also bring these questions to the wars of Yugoslav succession in the 1990s, examining how these later traumatic experiences and their psychological and political framing interacted with collective and individual memories of WWII. The societal and ethical dimension of psychological trauma will be addressed from different disciplinary angles and in different contexts. Finally, the recent interplay between notions of war suffering and victimhood on the one hand, and responsibility for large scale destruction, displacement and war crimes on the other, will also be discussed. 

Time: 23 Apr., 9:30 – 24 Apr., 15:30

Place: University of Rijeka (Croatia)

Organizer: Centre for Culture and the Mind (University of Copenhagen), Transcultural Psychiatry Section of the World Psychiatric Association, and Faculty of Medicine and Faculty of Health Studies, University of Rijeka.

Programme

23 April

09:30-10:30: Introduction and opening remarks

10:30-12:00: Politics of memory narratives:

  • Tanja Petrovic, From war trauma to “revolutionary violence”: Affective politics of remembering the WW2
  • Jelena Seferovic, Children of War: Between Trauma and Symbolism
  • Nebojsa Blanusa, Conspiracy theories on the Ukraine war in the “Balkan triangle”: comparative analysis of social networks in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, and Serbia

12:00-13:00 Lunch

13:00-14:30 Surviving the 1940s:

  • Katja Hrobat Virloget and Manca Švara, Silence, Trauma, and Conflicted Memories at the Slovenian-Italian Border
  • Ivan Smiljanic, Perception of heroic suicide among the partisans in socialist Yugoslavia

14:30-15:00 Coffee break

15:00 – 16:30 War, survival and everyday life:

  • Emina Zoletic, The Social Life of War Memory: Generalization, Silence, and Transgenerational Narratives in Bosnian context
  • Marija Krgovic, Teaching in the Aftermath: History Education and the Mediation of War Memories in Belgrade, Sarajevo, and Banja Luka
  • Sofia Poulia, Politicizing difficult pasts: Remembering & Forgetting in East Sarajevo

19:00 Dinner 

24 April

9:30-11:00 Cultural representations:

  • Martina Ricci, Commemorating Srebrenica: Cross-Cultural Representations and the Globalization of Trauma.
  • Tamara Kolarić, The ‘Homeland War’ as the Unspeakable: Challenging Dominant Memory through Trauma-Focused Films
  • Ciarrai Samson and Peter Leese, Fragments of War: memory, post-conflict experience and visual practice research methodologies

11:00-11:30 Coffee break

11:30-13:00 Psy-disciplines and Yugoslav wars:

  • Adrian Pelc, The Revolution’s Charge: Hugo Klajn’s and Paul Parin’s Struggle for the Yugoslav War Neurosis
  • Wiola Rebecka, War Rape Survivors Syndrome (WRSS) from the Holocaust to the Yugoslav Wars
  • Vladimir Jovic, Posttraumatic States Between the Biomedical Model and Social Construction

13:00-14:00 Lunch

14:00-15:30 Concluding discussion: Trauma narratives and beyond

https://cultmind.ku.dk/events/2025/living-in-the-aftermaths

Odgovori