research project: post-Yugoslav antinationalism

My doctoral research centred on discursive practices of post-Yugoslav antinationalism, critically examining the value of the national idiom to understand the post-Yugoslav wars and highlighting the role of alternative articulations of differentiation amongst those who actively resisted the nationalism that claimed to represent them. In addition to some articles and book chapters, the results of this research were published in Serbian as the book Antinacionalizam (XX Vek, 2005). Based on almost two years of ethnographic fieldwork in the capitals of Serbia and Croatia (1996-1998), it deploys a poststructuralist framework to dissect the role of nationality and its relative salience, for example in relation to gender and feminism. Inspired by Bourdieu's work, it analyses the role of Balkanist urban distinction embedded in a domesticated paradigm of modernisation. A constant throughout the analysis is the role of attempts to maintain the continuity of 'normal life', culminating in a chapter on Jugonostalgija. Overall my approach emphasises the need to conceive of national belonging in terms of degrees of intensity and relative significance, rather than in terms of set 'identities'. This fed into my later work, which focused on home-making. [photos creative commons pixabay]