The conference Spaces of Victimhood explores how memories of oppression, dislocation, marginalisation, economic exploitation and trauma shape identities and a sense of belonging to a place in Central, Eastern and Southeast Europe.
This event is free.
Event Information
Open to
- All
Availability
- Yes
Cost
- Free
Organiser
-
SSEES
Location
-
Masaryk room
UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies
16 Taviton street
London
WC1H 0BW
This conference investigates, through a multidisciplinary approach, how territories and spaces with histories of suffering, exploitation, and/or marginalisation cultivate distinct yet overlapping narratives of victimhood. These narratives, in turn, influence personal and collective identities, political engagement, and social divisions. Central to our discussions will be the concepts of victimhood – as multifactorial experiences caused by direct, historical or structural harms, suffering and marginalisation. The conference panels explore a range of topics, such as, but not exclusive to the spatially defined psychological, socio-economic, and political dimensions of grievances, how they contribute to the formation of collective identities, and the role of agency and institutions in creating such identities. Equally, the conference examine show spatially defined identities are communicated to exacerbate polarization but also help bridge societal divides.
Conference programme
Day 1: 18 June 2025
1pm: Registration and Refreshments
1.40pm: Welcome by Dr Jessie Barton Hronešová and Dr Pawel Bukowski (UCL SSEES)
2pm Panel 1: Accountability and Victimhood: The Afterlives of Wartime Suffering in the former Yugoslavia
- Moderator: Prof Jasna Dragovć Soso (LSE)
Speakers:
- Prof Tea Sindbaek Andersen and Dr Thomas Morton (University of Copenhagen, Denmark): History education and war memory in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Serbia;
- Dr Marija Grujic (European University Viadrina, Germany): Oscillations of Belonging: Victimhood, Displacement, and Gendered Place Attachments in Post-Conflict Serbia;
- Prof Olivera Simic (Griffith University, Australia): Narratives of Victimhood in Bosnia and Herzegovina
3.30pm: Coffee Break
3.45pm: Panel 2: Memory, Language, and Belonging: Victimisation across Time and Space
- Moderator: Dr Jakub Beneš (UCL SSEES)
Speakers:
- Alesia Mankouskaya (UCL SSEES): Language as a Borderline: Exilic Tongues and the Self-Edification of a Nation;
- Nikola Lero (University of Sheffield, UK): “Po šumama, gorama, i blokovima” – Transgenerational Memoryscapes of Diasporic Urban-Rural Homing of the British Yugoslav Diaspora in Post-Yugoslav Homelands
- Dr Katarzyna Zechenter (UCL SSEES): Cultural Victimisation: Cracow as the Capital of the Generalgouvernement, 1939-1945
4:15pm: Coffee Break
5.45pm Keynote: Professor Dirk Moses (Anne and Bernard Spitzer Professor of International Relations at the City College of New York, CUNY, USA): Victims of History, Authors of Destiny: Partisan Memory and Trauma Subjectification
- Moderator: Dr Jessie Barton Hronešová (UCL SSEES)
7.30pm: Dinner (invitation only)
Day 2: 19 June 2025
9.30am Panel 3: Displacement and Borders in Central and Eastern Europe
- Moderator: Dr Elodie Dourain (UCL SSEES)
Speakers:
- Qianrui Hu (UCL SSEES): Trajectories of War and Displacement: the Embodiment of ‘Donbas’ across Temporal and Spatial Borders;
- Leonardo Zanatta (Corvinus University of Budapest, Hungary): Defining Borders, Defining Selves: Borderization as South Ossetia’s Quest for Ontological Security;
- Dr Klaudia Kosicińska (Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland): “A dedicated little room”: private hosting of refugees from Ukraine in Poland
11.15am: break
11.30am Panel 4: Identity, Discourses and Representations of Harm across Central and Eastern Europe
- Moderator: Dr Pawel Bukowski (UCL SSEES)
Speakers:
- Dr Dana Dolghin (Amsterdam School for Heritage, Memory and Material Culture, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands): Spaces of Suffering: Emotional Geographies of Exclusion in Eastern Europe;
- Dr Martin Brown (Richmond American University London): Recasting the Past Online: Digital Spaces, New Right Conspiracism, and the Politics of Victimhood in Central Europe;
- Dr Cagla Demirel (CBEES, Södertörn University and Stockholm University Institute for Turkish Studies, Sweden): Political Pathologies of Victimhood Narratives in Eastern Europe
1pm: Final words: Dr Pawel Bukowski and Dr Jessie Barton Hronešová
1.20pm: Buffet Lunch
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