Langugae SWITCH
Tijekom 2023. godine suradnice projekta sudjelovale su na znanstvenim konferencijama na kojima su predstavljeni rezultati istraživanja tijekom projekta.
Nekoliko izlaganja održano je u okviru 16. SIEF kongresa Living Uncertainty koji se održao 7.-10. lipnja 2023. u Brnu, Češka. Nevena Škrbić Alempijević održala je izlaganje Rethinking Europe and imagining urban futures in Croatia, Mirna Tkalčić Simetić Walking “in, about and through“ research atmospheres in a post-earthquake city, Katja Hrobat Virloget Silence between conflict memories, traumatic past and future. A reflection on the reasons and meanings of silence on the “Istrian exodus”, a u skupnom su radu Saša Poljak Istenič, Neža Čebtron Lipovec i Valentina Gulin Zrnić predstavile istraživanje Pasts and futures of urban space: a case study of a small Mediterranean square.
Valentina Gulin Zrnić i Saša Poljak Istenič sudjelovale su na konferenciji Empowering Futures: Long-term Governance, Democracy and Futures Research koja se održala u finskom gradu Turku, u organizaciji Centra za istraživanje finskih budućnosti i Sveučiliša Turku, 16.-18. lipnja 2023., te su izložile metodološki rad From Ethnography to Lateral Thinking: Empowering Young People for Future-Making.
Marina Blagaić Bergman predstavila je studiju koju je pripremila s Valentinom Gulin Zrnić, The solar energy transition in three Croatian towns, u okviru radionice Renewable Energy and Post-Carbon Futures koju su organizirale EASA mreže Energy Anthropology & Futures Anthropologies Network u Lisabonu 15. – 17. lipnja 2023.
Tihana Rubić sudjelovala je na znanstveno-stručnom interdisciplinarnom skupu Ruralna Hrvatska – izazovi očuvanja prostornih identiteta i unapređenja kvalitete života koji se održao u Sisku, 13. i 14. listopada 2023. Izložen je rad pod nazivom Prostorne i društvene transformacije te (zamišljene) budućnosti postindustrijskog Gojla i Kutine.
Na poziv prof.dr.sc. Sethe Low u ime Američkog antropološkog društva, Valentina Gulin Zrnić sudjelovala je na godišnjoj konferenciji Američkog i Kanadskog antropološkog društva koja se održala u Torontu 15. – 19. studenog 2023. godine pod zajedničkom temom Transitions. Pozvano sudjelovanje odnosilo se na panel – okrugli stol o javnim prostorima pod nazivom Public Space in Transiton: New Meanings and Configuratons koju je organizirala Setha Low u okviru rada sekcije AAA Critical Urban Anthropology Association.
SAŽECI IZLAGANJA
Nevena Škrbić Alempijević, Rethinking Europe and imagining urban futures in Croatia (sažetak): This paper discusses how the concept of Europe – a term unavoidable in the country’s political and media discourses in the last three decades – is defined, negotiated, and sometimes challenged by the everyday experiences of people living in Croatia nowadays. The author approaches the everyday uses of the concept as mechanisms through which people construct memories of their pasts, address current uncertainties, and shape visions of their futures. She deals with ways in which the notion of Europe is materialized in Croatian cityscapes, thus becoming a part of people’s spatial practices. The analysis is based on case studies related to two cities: Zagreb and Rijeka. The first example centres on one of Zagreb’s central squares – the European Square – restructured and opened to the public on the eve of the country’s accession to the EU in 2013. The square has become a venue for events that inscribe diverse, sometimes clashing, meanings of Europe in public space. The second example follows the remaking of Rijeka into a European Capital of Culture in 2020. It points to the European dimension of city-making processes triggered by the ECOC initiative, as well as to ways in which local inhabitants use the project to reimagine the futures in/of the city. Finally, the author explores whether the approaches of critical (post-)area studies and current theories in the anthropology of space can be applied to re-examine the centre – periphery power relations that emerge in making sense of Europe in contemporary Croatian (and other) contexts.
Mirna Tkalčić Simetić, Walking “in, about and through“ research atmospheres in a post-earthquake city (sažetak): In March and December 2020 two strong earthquakes hit Zagreb, the capital of Croatia, causing the loss of one life and great material damage. Almost three years since those events, very few steps have been made towards successfull post-earthquake recovery, leaving many citizens displaced or living in materially unstable buildings. At the same time, cracks in destabilized facades permanently threaten spaces beneath them, namely sidewalks as transitory public spaces of great significance. Walking in an unsafe and unstable city adds new layers to the qualitative technique of „walking ethnography“ (Gulin Zrnić and Škrbić Alempijević 2019:30) apprehended as a mobile interview. The aim of this paper is to broaden the concept of walking ethnography to all walking practices in the fieldwork setting, including solitary research walks, walking in organized protests and walking during informal conversations. By doing so, walking becomes an entry to „knowing in, about and through atmospheres“ (Sumartojo and Pink 2019), serving as a methodological and analytical tool which enables approaching experiental worlds of others (and our own) and better understanding of „conditions in which atmospheres emerge and the meanings that people ascribe to them“ (ibid.: 6). I propose that walking research practices performed in the center of Zagreb contribute to emergence of atmospheres whose temporal, spatial and affective dimensions reflect politically and historically produced socio-spatial injustices and in different ways address general atmosphere of uncertainty. Also, such approach reveals uncertainty inherent to atmospheres themselves, ucertainty of moving through materially unstable environmet and the one regarding city futures.
Katja Hrobat Virloget, Silence between conflict memories, traumatic past and future. A reflection on the reasons and meanings of silence on the “Istrian exodus” (sažetak): After more than sixty years, the “Istrian exodus”, the massive migrations of (mostly) Italians from Yugoslavia after WWII, continues to stir emotions and provoke disputes in international politics. My research of it in Istria, which after “exodus” radically changed the population structure, has been pervaded by an omnipresent silence and strong emotions. In the dominant research silence is treated as a consequence of socio-political power relations, the relationship between dominant and marginalized social groups and memories. Indeed, silence ensues when memory cannot rely on collective memory because it is unacknowledged (Halbwachs 2001). However, silence can be seen as the consequence of emotional trauma, the impossibility of narration. By keeping silent people protect themselves and avoid everything that reminds them of the emotional trauma. If memory does not process traumas from the past, there is a danger of a “conspiracy of silence” and the collective identity can rely on collective silence. The research identified other kind of communication tactics by which people tried to retain control over emotionally burdensome memories. But emotions like fear, sadness, humiliation etc. are communicated and transmitted through signs of embodied memories (Kidron 2009). The main methodological problem is how to detect them? How to research silence, even when silence is filled with words? What impact on the traumatic silence and its future can have an ethnological research which contextualize, acknowledge and articulate the untold? These and other questions will be dealt with in the Istrian case of the memories on the post WW II “exodus”.
Saša Poljak Istenič, Neža Čebtron Lipovec i Valentina Gulin Zrnić, Pasts and futures of urban space: a case study of a small Mediterranean square (sažetak): The presentation derives from the research of “Giardinetto”, a square in the heart of the historic city of Koper/Capodistria (Slovenia). The site is an open public space, currently with no official name. It served as a parking lot for several decades until the beginning of 2022. However, the site is permeated by various historical uses, cultural practices, affects, and meanings while awaiting a thorough renewal. Because of the turbulent 20th-century history and significant demographic changes within the region, the town of Koper itself is a contested landscape. The research relied on the ethnographic methods of studying space (mapping, participant observation, interviews, historical sources), participant action research, and the photo-voice method. The material was analyzed through constituency analysis and thematic coding. The qualitative methodology provided the insights into the place attachment processes and affective atmospheres remembered or lived in the space. The research aimed to understand the complexities and layers of this historic urban space, particularly its contested nature (ethnicity, class, gender, economic activities, usage, etc.) and affects and emotions attached to the site while questioning heritage dissonance and multiple publics as well as discussing possible futures. This case study is a work in progress; research results are currently presented to the local community. The site is perceived as an urban heritage, and its renewal is discussed on various levels. These discussions also produce a particular affective atmosphere of the site that will be constitutive for Giardinetto’s future.
Valentina Gulin Zrnić i Saša Poljak Istenič, From Ethnography to Lateral Thinking: Empowering Young People for Future-Making (sažetak): Unlike many other European countries, Croatia and Slovenia have not paid much attention to the development of future thinking and have generally failed to achieve a functional standard of future literacy. This is especially evident when working with young people. While some engage in protests, social movements, or local politics for a better future and eloquently demand change, the majority remain passive, silent, or incoherent when asked about their aspirations. The feeling that they have reached their life’s impasse (Berlant) has been exacerbated – at least in our countries – by natural disasters, pandemics, and the current war on the edge of the EU, as well as by ongoing, prolonged political and economic shocks and crises that have led to insecurity and distrust in democracy. To empower young people, especially the silent majority, for future-thinking and future-making and develop their “capacity to aspire” (Appadurai), we have experimented with an approach based on the ideas and tools of lateral thinking developed by Edward de Bono. We organised workshops with university students who had previously ethnographically studied urban phenomena in selected towns. To expand their capacity, imagination, and creativity in identifying, addressing, and solving urban problems, we engaged them in developing new ideas for cities beyond the current repetitive and limited narrations in public discourses. In particular, we employed lateral thinking tools to not only inspire their future-thinking but also to prompt their agency for future-making, supporting them in developing concrete ideas for more ecological, inclusive, just, vibrant, co-designed, and participatory urban public spaces. In response to the question of how the scientific community can contribute to empowering futures, the presentation will focus on how we combine ethnography and lateral thinking tools to empower young people for future-making, assess the implications of such an approach for futures research, and reflect critically on its epistemological, practical and ethical issues.
Marina Blagaić Bergman i Valentina Gulin Zrnić, The solar energy transition in three Croatian towns (sažetak): The energy transition is a complex set of structural changes with interrelated political, economic, social, cultural, environmental, and climatic factors. In Croatia, as in other European countries, these changes are guided by EU legislation, funding, and various agendas, incentives, and examples of good practices that are then channeled through state frameworks to the local communities. In this paper, we follow and discuss the implementation of the energy transition in three Croatian localities that differ in size, number of inhabitants, national and international status and influence, as well as in the dominant processes that currently structure everyday life in these communities. The first is the town of Hvar, a small Mediterranean island community that is characterized by the seasonality of its summer tourism, which significantly affects the number of inhabitants and energy demand. The second is the town of Petrinja, a peripheral, shrinking town in the central part of Croatia that was heavily damaged in the 2020 earthquake and is currently in the state of reconstruction. The third is Zagreb, the capital, also hit by the earthquake in 2020, which functions as the center of political and administrative power and has a metropolitan region of over 1 million inhabitants. The energy transition that we focus on is the implementation of solar energy, and the main interest is to describe and better understand the ways in which top-down policies reached the local communities and merged with local initiatives concerning the transition to clean energies. We argue that differences in the economic, political, social, and cultural contexts of the three localities under analysis produce various circumstances and possibilities for the energy transition to be implemented at a general level and accepted at an everyday level. The study derives from the project Urban Futures: Imagining and Activating Possibilities in Unsettled Times (HRZZ – ARRS) and is based on analyses of national and local policies and ethnographic fieldwork on how the energy transition has been negotiated both from the top-down and from the bottom-up with an emphasis on energy justice and the nature of agency that specific actors of these processes are exhibiting.
Tihana Rubić, Prostorne i društvene transformacije te (zamišljene) budućnosti postindustrijskog Gojla i Kutine (sažetak): U radu se etnološki i kulturnoantropološki opisuju i promišljaju dvije lokacije – njihove prostorne, vremenske, materijalne i društvene preobrazbe kroz 20. stoljeće. Gojlo i Kutina predstavljaju dvije geografski i „sudbinski“ bliske lokacije – nastale su kao planirani gradovi/naselja za potrebe industrije; iscrpljivanjem postojećih prirodnih resursa, u krizi sirovina, te s transformacijama političkih i ekonomskih makrosustava, Gojlo i Kutina sekvencionalno doživljavaju prostornu i društvenu stagnaciju i degradaciju. Istraživačka pitanja u ovom izlaganju usmjerena su na problematizaciju dinamičkog odnosa prostora/mjesta i vremena u top-down urbanistički planiranim lokacijama. Kritička analiza se oslanja na istraživačka područja (post)industrijskog grada, industrijske monokulture, stvaranja mjesta, antropologije budućnosti, višestruke temporalnosti i antropologije optimizma. Temelji se na etnografskom istraživanju provedenom u više navrata u periodu od 2020. do 2023. godine. U radu se ilustriraju formativni elementi prošlosti ovih dviju lokacija, njihovo „zlatno“ doba, razdoblje ekonomskog i društvenog uzleta te njihova degradacija i deindustrijalizacija. Naposljetku se postavlja pitanje o prošlim i sadašnjim (zamišljenim) budućnostima ovih ruralno-urbanih lokacija.
AAA/CASCA Annual Meeting: TRANSITIONS
Public Space in Transition: New Meanings and Configurations
4:15 PM – 6:00 PM TMCC – 711 (Roundtable/Town Hall – In-Person)
Critical Urban Anthropology Association
ORGANIZER: Setha Low (CUNY, Graduate Center)
CHAIR: Suzanne Scheld (California State University, Northridge, Department of Anthropology)
PRESENTERS: Julian Brash (Montclair State University, Department of Anthropology),Maurice Rafael Magaña (University of Arizona),Valentina Gulin Zrnic (Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research, Croatia) ,Naomi Adiv (University of Toronto),Mervyn Horgan (University of Guelph, Department of Sociology & Anthropology)
DISCUSSANTS: Setha Low (CUNY, Graduate Center) and Matilde Cordoba Azcarate (University of California, San Diego)
DESCRIPTION: This roundtable reconsiders the utility of public space as an analytic concept, spatial configuration and political ideal. As public space transitions into something new, virtual and hybrid, several key questions emerge. Is the term still useful for those who work on public activist projects? Is the philosophical and political ideal relevant to the public/private development of spaces like Hudson Yards in New York City or the northern suburbs of Bogota? Faced with the challenges of capitalist-driven illiberal and neoliberal urbanism, will public space retain normative value because of its role in providing greening and ecoservices, informal workplaces, health and well-being, and sites for democratic practices? How do we deal with these contradictory and complex forms of public space, and how do they influence our work? By questioning what public space means today and its political potential for tomorrow, this roundtable explores how the concept has changed, and perhaps no longer is adequate to address the contemporary complexity of urban space use and production. The panelists assess the value of retaining this term, with its conceptual and historical legacies, and to determine whether another framework offers a beter way build a more inclusive, just, and socially and ecologically responsible future. We do so using ethnographically grounded analysis that explores the ways in which the novel and the familiar, power and resistance, and the virtual and the physical are entangled in these emergent, hybrid spaces that we have understood as public. -Maurice Rafael Magaña asks how public space can serve as an archive of struggle and community through the nexus of physical and virtual spaces.
Matilde Còrdoba Azcárate investigates new forms of place-making occurring along the rails of the Tren Maya. -Mervyn Horgan examines Canadian outdoor ice rinks as expressive spaces of intergenerational, interracial, and multi-skill interactions that are absent or hindered in other spaces -Julian Brash discusses the relationship between aesthetics and the production of value on the High Line in New York City, which results in a politically ambiguous space characterized by a complex balance between openness and inclusiveness, on the one hand, and control and exclusion, on the other. -Kristin Monroe asks how current geopolitics shape and are expressed through the urban landscape of Beirut. -Naomi Adiv wonders that as North American cities transition to more privatized streams of revenue for capital and operating budgets, who will have the power to maintain the urban public realm? Valentine Gulin Zrnic employs imagery and imagination to explore how we can become more visionary and creative through co-design and participatory planning processes. Setha Low, as discussant, asks why German and Austrian socio-spatial scholars reject the notion of public space and prefer the concept of ‘lived space’ in its stead. She considers where these various re-conceptualizations might lead in the North and South American context where ‘publicness’ has profound political consequences.
