Panels

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Infrastructures et réseaux en crise dans les Balkans : entre maintenance et détournement

Aliki Angelidou, Université Panteion à Athènes 

Sophie Chevalier, Université de Picardie Jules Verne/Amiens 

Raphaëlle Segond, ENS Lyon

Clément Dillenseger, ANR METABOL-HEAT, UMR 5600 - Laboratoire Ville Environnement Société - Lyon

Le panel proposé aborde les infrastructures urbaines comme des assemblages sociotechniques et politiques qui doivent permettre de fournir une série de services aux citadins : de transport, de l'énergie et de l'eau potable, des espaces commerciaux et de loisirs et des institutions éducatives et culturelles, pour ne donner que ces exemples. Elles renvoient à une matérialité, voire à une socialité dont la dimension politique est centrale en ce qui concerne, en particulier, l’accès à ces biens ; et elles sont aussi bien publiques, mixtes que privées. 

Les services qu’elles rendent restent souvent invisibles aux yeux des usagers, sauf quand ils connaissent des dysfonctionnements ou des suspensions. Tel est notamment le cas des infrastructures territorialisées que sont les réseaux. En Europe, les services en réseau (eau du robinet, électricité, ramassage des déchets...) sont banalisés, associés à la modernité et au progrès. Pourtant, leur construction, loin d’être un mouvement spontané du « développement », résulte d’arbitrages socio-politiques. Dans les Balkans, la généralisation de ces normes de confort a lieu en ville dès la fin de l’Empire ottoman, accompagne la construction des États modernes et atteint les espaces ruraux après 1945. Elle se poursuit aujourd’hui, notamment via le processus d’européanisation : dans un double mouvement de « développement » et de protection de l’environnement, l’Union Européenne subventionne la mise en place, par les États membres, des infrastructures de l’urbanisme des réseaux. 

Ce panel souhaite aborder deux questions : d’une part, celle du maintien des infrastructures et des réseaux qui s’inscrit dans les politiques du care, un concept qui occupe une place centrale dans les débats actuels en sciences sociales. Cette notion insiste sur les relations d’interdépendance qui se nouent entre le soin des choses et le soin des personnes, et de fait, elles s’inscrivent dans une temporalité et un cycle de vie. On parle aussi aujourd’hui d’une crise de la maintenance, en lien avec les politiques d’austérité qui conduisent soit à l’abandon de certaines infrastructures soit à leur privatisation. D’autre part, l’on observe dans les pays balkaniques des formes de ce qu’on pourrait nommer une forme « distanciation » par rapport aux infrastructures, en réseaux ou pas d’ailleurs. Elles sont utilisées sans croire à leur efficacité, dans les discours officiels, on assiste à la mise en place d’une gestion/utilisation alternative comme autant de pratiques d’autonomie par rapport aux services de l’État. 

Nous attendons des contributions basées sur des ethnographies, qui portent sur la relation entre les habitants et leur environnement construit, aux attentes que suscitent ces infrastructures et aux stratégies mises en place dans des situations de dysfonctionnement ou de leur disparition, dans un contexte d’austérité économique et de crise climatique, et de défiance par rapport aux services proposés par l’État.

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The invisible, the silent and the loss: Museums in the Balkans since 1990s 

Ina Belcheva, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, LIRA

Milica Popovic, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Institute of Culture Studies

This panel aims to interrogate the materiality of the invisible, the silent and the loss, in museums, art and commemorative spaces. Understanding the acute need for the engagement of local communities and challenging traditional top-down memory practices, the panel seeks to identify the cracks in mainstream museum discourses, spaces, and practices.

Heritage and memory politics are essential to ethno-national identity-building processes, collections becoming important symbols of belonging in a nation (Hall 1992), with museums leading as sites of “institutionalized exclusion” (Bourdieu and Darbel 1966; Sandell 1998). Understanding memory as multidirectional (Rothberg 2009) and palimpsestic (Silverman 2015), it can align with hegemonic discourses—as represented in official narratives and public spaces through the careful choice of materiality of memory politics—as much as it can misalign through the creation of counter-narratives and counter-memorials (Young 1992). Mnemonic silences can be marked by intentionality (refusing to overtly mention versus failing to overtly mention), covertness (remaining mnemonically silent but covertly remembering), and relatedness (remaining mnemonically silent about information related or unrelated to what was overtly mentioned) (Stone and Zwolinski 2025). However, all materiality of silence appears through invisibility and destroying materialities, producing mnemonic consequences caused by not only epistemic but also moral inattentions (Alloa 2023). These invisibilities can comprehend individuals and groups, as much as events, ideas and objects that signify them, all supporting politics of exclusion, obscuring the “part of those who have no part” (Rancière 1989: 30). 

Such occurrences are noted in the absence and/or marginalization of topics related to socialist Yugoslavia in the national history museums of Serbia and Croatia, which undertook the role of prominent actors in the ethno-nationalization of historiographies (Popović and Jagdhuhn 2024), or even the mere lack of permanent exhibitions understood as expressions of the instability of newly established hegemonic discourses. Similar invisibility and loss appeared also in the cases in which in the 1990s many museums in the Balkans were closed, destroyed, their collections hidden in the depots, pillaged and (re)sold, or even stolen due to the regime changes, and/or diverse conflicts, simple reorientation of and lack of funding within the new “transitional” realities. 

On the other hand, mnemonic actors such as private museums, digital collections, non-governmental organizations, or artistic collectives have undertaken the role of filling in the blanks of the official histories. The path towards erasure of marginalization is precisely through visibility and epistemic disobedience (Mignolo 2008) and emanating the materiality of counter-narratives and inclusion of the marginalized in memory politics.

This panel aims to illuminate the materiality of the invisible, the silent and the loss in memory politics of the Balkans. We welcome contributions in both French and English on topics including, but not limited to:

• Silent memory artefacts
• Estranged political collections in museums
• Conflictual or conflicted museum (collections)
• Dis/empowered objects, stolen collections’ objects
• Exclusionary practices of hegemonic memory discourses and hidden histories
• Decolonizing museums
• Inclusivity in museological practices
• Materiality of the invisible and the silent in memory narratives and practices
• Invisibility of monuments/monuments of the invisible
• Material disruptions of silence through counter-narratives and “counter-memorials”
• Invisible audiences and the impact of memory politics

We welcome proposals from multiple disciplines: museology, history, memory studies, art history, law and anthropology, in an non-exhaustive list. We are also interested in testimonies of museum professionals.

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Memorial Sites and Objects as Conflict-Framing Tools in the Post-Yugoslav Space

Ana Devic, Aix-Marseille University

Martina Ricci, Scuola Superiore Meridionale (SSM), Naples

Peter Vermeersch, KU Leuven

This panel proposes to investigate how the exhibition of everyday objects in cultural institutions across the post-Yugoslav space and the broader Balkans, as well as other memory-invoking public performances, including commemorative practices, shape public perceptions of war atrocities and influences collective memory. The panel also explores the challenges stemming from these exhibitions and performances, including the risks of fetishization and "touristization". The panel is open to social scientists and other contributors involved in theory, ethnographic research and artistic memory activism that investigate tools of reclaiming spaces of war atrocities as potentially inclusive places of memory. We invite contributions that critically examine and juxtapose memory practices that either create or hinder inclusive remembrance of past violence. We have a particular interest in papers employing participatory research methods, unraveling the search for active forms of memory that stimulate citizens to deal with polarizing political forces in relation to mass atrocities. The panel is placed in a comparative-historical perspective that may also include themes of European revisionisms of the Cold War, WWII, post-colonialism memories, and other post-violence contexts.

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Enjeux des patrimoines matériels et immatériels pour la protection de l’environnement

Orianne Crouteix, UMR 7303, TELEMMe & Association AIDA

Sylvain Guyot, Université Bordeaux Montaigne (UMR 5319 CNRS Passages)

François Lerin, Association AIDA

Les Balkans, comme le reste de l’Europe, engagent, ici et là, et parfois de manière conflictuelle, des stratégies de transition pour répondre aux urgences de la grande transformation environnementale (réchauffement climatique, 6eme extinction de la biodiversité, pollution et surconsommation des ressources naturelles...). Parmi les outils identifiés pour construire ces stratégies, les patrimoines tiennent une place particulière. Cette notion englobe des entités naturelles, culturelles et mixtes et pointe à la fois des ressources, des usages, des territoires, des traditions, des pratiques, etc. qui résistent (de plus en plus difficilement) à l’intensification, à la surexploitation et aux menaces d’oblitération, de brouillage ou de destruction.

Les processus de « labellisation » à différentes échelles et selon des registres de légitimité variables, permettent de matérialiser l’urgence de la protection de l’environnement. Les patrimoines matériels et immatériels sont alors convoqués, séparément ou ensemble, pour protéger, revitaliser voire amplifier et gérer ce qui devient des atouts ou des opérateurs de durabilité et de transition. 

Il convient d’abord d’identifier ces patrimoines, d’en définir les attributs et ensuite de discuter en quoi ils peuvent servir à consolider des stratégies environnementales aux forts enjeux politiques. Mais au-delà de la matérialisation administrative sur une carte géographique des zonages d’aires protégées souvent peu ou mal gérées, quelles sont les autres formes de matérialisation qui permettent d’activer puis de concrétiser la réalité de cette protection ? Il faut mieux comprendre comment et pourquoi la matérialisation patrimoniale de ces stratégies est indispensable, comme leur médiatisation sur les réseaux - face aux excès de l’extractivisme énergétique et à l’emballement de certains fronts touristiques prédateurs. 

Cette session thématique interroge l’appropriation, la valorisation et la labellisation de différentes (im)matérialités patrimoniales qui permettent d’incarner voire de catalyser ces processus de protection de l’environnement pour leur redonner force, en particulier de manière ascendante dans le contexte des luttes et mobilisations environnementales.

Plusieurs entrées peuvent être mobilisées pour incarner ces actions environnementales matérialisées sous forme d’artéfacts territoriaux, environnementaux, artistiques et culturels et même s’inscrire dans un rapport renouvelé au sacré. 

On peut évoquer le cas du pastoralisme au sens large et les projets d’inscription de ses « paysages culturels évolutifs » (catégorie de l’Unesco qui combine les attributs matériels et immatériels) ; la « transhumance » liées à ces modes d’élevage qui est maintenant inscrite pour un certain nombre de pays des Balkans dans la Liste du patrimoine immatériel de l’Humanité (toujours de l’UNESCO). Bien d’autres patrimoines sont identifiés, reconnus et valorisés autour : des zones humides, des pratiques de fauche, des géoparcs, des bâtis, des représentations d’un territoire etc. la liste est très longue. Il convient d’interroger les raisons et les modalités d’identification de ces patrimoines divers et leur inscription dans des processus de protection, de réhabilitation ou de valorisation et des actions environnementales.

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Matière et longue durée : pour une réflexion scalaire et disciplinaire 

Gilles de Rapper, École française d’Athènes 

François Lerin, ONG AIDA 

Cette session thématique se présente comme un lieu de discussion méthodologique sur la façon dont la matière et les matériaux permettent de penser la longue durée et la périodisation ainsi que les relations entre les disciplines. L’étude de la longue durée se heurte en effet à des solutions de continuité évidentes, telles que les expriment les périodisations qui découpent le temps long en segments temporels et la division disciplinaire qui va de l’archéologie des temps anciens à l’anthropologie des temps présents. À la segmentation temporelle de l’archéologie et de l’histoire, divisées en sous-disciplines attachées chacune à l’étude d’une période, répondrait la fragmentation conceptuelle des disciplines du contemporain, par approches, objets ou méthodes. En bref, il semble établi que lorsque l’on change d’échelle ou de pas de temps (comme aussi d’échelle spatiale ou de nombre), on change d’objet et de méthode. 

Dès lors, travailler sur une même matérialité (une matière, un matériau) permet-il de dépasser ces discontinuités et de mieux penser la longue durée ? Dans quelle mesure la prise en compte de la matérialité, au niveau descriptif, au niveau analytique comme au niveau narratif de la recherche, permet-elle de produire un savoir sur la longue durée, et pour quel gain ? En d’autres termes, le matériel peut-il être un fil d’Ariane permettant de passer d’une période à une autre, d’une discipline à une autre, d’un dispositif de recherche à un autre et de trouver un chemin dans le labyrinthe de la longue période et des disciplines ? 

Cette réflexion prend appui sur les travaux d’une équipe multidisciplinaire et multinationale qui s’intéresse à l’exploitation, aux usages et aux représentations d’une matière, le bitume, dans la longue durée. Les gisements de bitume de Selenicë, en Albanie du Sud, connus depuis le Néolithique et toujours en activité aujourd’hui, fournissent la matière à une étude associant archéologues, géologues, historiens, géographes et anthropologues dans le cadre d’un projet financé par l’ANR (Pix Illyrica. Les gisements de bitume de Selenicë (Albanie) : matière, territoire et société de l’Antiquité à nos jours). 

L’équipe du projet fournira une communication d’ouverture, mais cette session thématique est une invitation faite à d’autres projets individuels ou collectifs que cette réflexion sur la longue durée et les disciplines intéresse. On peut penser à d’autres matériaux (sel, bois, marbre, métaux) ou à d’autres produits (fromage, vin, cuir, poterie) qui s’offrent à une étude sur le temps long ; on peut penser aussi à d’autres dispositifs de recherche associant différentes disciplines pour l’étude du temps long.

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Yugoslav Socialist Internationalism through the Lens of Materiality 

Jelena Đureinović, Research Center for the History of Transformations (RECET) at the University of Vienna

Blanche Plaquevent, Aix-Marseille Université

Yugoslav socialist internationalism has been primarily studied through the lens of the circulations of ideas and people. A rich historical literature has shown how these circulations developed in the 1950s-1960s around non-alignment and anti-colonialism, especially between socialist Yugoslavia and African countries, but also between Yugoslavia and New Left movements in Western Europe2. These circulations for instance manifested through Yugoslav labour actions and technical cooperation programs. 

This panel proposes to recast the history of Yugoslav socialism internationalism through the lens of materiality and to approach the circulation of actors from the perspective of objects that traveled with them or that were part of exchanges of ideas, knowledge and people. We welcome contributions about all kind of objects that people took with them or accompanied, such as photographies3, material texts, technologies, etc. 

The panel represents a starting point for discussion of material cultures of Yugoslavia’s socialist globalisation. How can thinking about material circulations transform our understanding of socialist internationalism? Can it lead to decentring our studies from a political/ideological focus? Can it be a way of developing less top-down perspectives? 

We welcome papers from scholars seeking to explore the material dimension of their work on Yugoslav socialist internationalism.

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Architecture for Education and Culture in the Balkans: cross-cultural connections and transfers of ideas 

Jasna Galjer, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb 

Sanja Lončar, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb 

The panel is focused on the analysis and interpretation of the specific architectural typology – multifunctional complexes for education and culture as an exceptionally numerous, diverse collection of buildings and institutions in European countries. Although the first were founded in the 19th century, their typology, names, organizational structure, activities, creation and implementation of cultural policy differ depending on the socio-political and cultural circumstances and the time and place they were created. These multifunctional complexes include e.g. people’s reading rooms, popular universities, people’s and workers’ universities, centres for culture, houses of culture, community (people’s) centres, cooperative centres, labour union houses, workers’ houses, parks and houses for Pioneers, peasant houses, commercial unity centres, peasant unity centres, educational houses, music and theatre halls, sport centres, etc. (Galjer and Lončar 2019). By applying interdisciplinary approaches, the aim is to shed light on the historical, socio-political, and cultural context in which multifunctional buildings and institutions for education and culture were created and transformed, and to give the wider contexts of its creation and use, as well as the changes occurring in the post-socialist period. These buildings and institutions have been important centres of the cultural and social life of communities, and not infrequently significant construction, architectural, and urban projects, representing modernization in the form of industrial development, urbanization, infrastructure expansion and social and political reform. Architecture with a specific function played a prominent role in local, regional, or national history during the socialist period, engendering various emotions and perceptions in the public discourse. Throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, changes in socio-political systems resulted in numerous transformations in their use, maintenance, financing, organisation, management, activities, societal perceptions, and local community roles (Galjer and Lončar 2021). Our aim is to look at how architecture participated in continuous processes of identity transformation, and to shed light on the underexplored sources of modernities that developed on the margins of the main narrative of understanding architecture culture as a vehicle of modernization. The focus is on the life of the buildings themselves, primarily through learning about people and activities related to architecture, including the question of how is often neglected, difficult, dark and unwanted heritage incorporated into the narratives of the contemporary communities? We invite papers that bring the perspective of people (users of buildings – individuals, groups, communities, associations, organizations, etc. who use buildings as owners, visitors or other stakeholders) and/or point to the (cultural, artistic, educational and other) activities, practices and contents that are created around or in buildings. We welcome case studies that answer, but are not limited to, the following questions: 

• How do users' perspectives, untold stories and memories, alternative histories, help us gain new perspectives and hidden narratives on (already known) buildings and institutions? 

• How the meanings and values associated with the buildings were shaped and changed; for example, symbolism and messages that have been inscribed in the building, the communication and exchange of knowledge that the building encouraged, the emotional relationships that employees and visitors created towards the building? 

• How constructed narratives on architecture as a part of ‘difficult’ heritage reflect on the strategies to neglect/destroy or maintain it? 

• How have multifunctional buildings and institutions for education and culture enabled cultural production (art, music, film, etc.) and practices? 

• How these ‘sites’ generate dialogue in contemporary architectural culture? 

• How various strategies used architecture and other forms of culture production to construct, or unify a collective identity, and what were the impacts of these actions? 

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Fluid materialities: how water matters in the Balkans

Tibissaï Guevara-Braun, Triangle (UMR 5606)

Aida Kapetanović, RECAS programme (University of Rijeka and Belgrade)

This thematic panel aims to foster debate on water in the Balkans as a contested materiality. In its essence, water is a wild and volatile substance, which varies in form, quantity and strength throughout seasons and climates. In the Balkan peninsula, fresh and salt waters have historically carved landscapes and milieus, shaped the lives of humans and non-humans, defined cultural meanings and identities, have been used for irrigation or for energy production. As a circulating material, water has ensured connectivity between economic and mercantile hubs throughout the region or has separated communities. With the Balkan peninsula strongly impacted by the climate crisis, we aim at discussing how water – understood at the same time as a common good, an economic opportunity, a destructive force as well as a resource to be defended – is conceived, managed and advocated for in the region. How do public and private actors, as well as civil society, interact, collaborate or clash around water in the framework of the climate crisis and the ecological transition? 

We propose three different directions that individual contributions could explore and/or intertwine: 

• Water as a profitable materiality to be exploited. Water is a resource that can be commercialized and patrimonialized. Contributions could explore logics of water appropriation and privatization by local or international entities. What issues arise with public authorities granting licences for fresh water exploitation? How are inherited technological and industrial knowledge, capacities and infrastructures mobilized towards sustainable development? Contributions could relate with broader capitalist and neoliberal trends in the Balkans (privatizations, extractivism). 

• Water as a material risk to mitigate and dominate. Water represents a material risk of growing significance due to climate change. To what extent recent floods and droughts in the region have pushed actors to conceive water in terms of risk? What are the legal, financial and technical instruments put into place by international, national and local actors to mitigate or control droughts and floods? Contributions could delve into the politics and policies of natural disaster prevention and management, or discuss climate change mitigation and adaptation efforts in the region. 

• Water as a transnational material flux that redesigns communities and mobilizations. Water is a material flux that can link and bring together communities, actors (activists, NGOs, experts and scientists) and struggles throughout the region. How do cultural representations and social uses of fresh water circulate across the region? Contributions could analyse the transnationalization of environmental activism around fresh water protection. Proposals could reflect on how water protection in the Balkans has united international NGOs and prominent environmental figures.

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Unruly Routes? Commodities and Borders in the Cold War Adriatic

Andreas Guidi, INALCO – CREE, Paris

Sabine Rutar, IOS Regensburg and ERC Open Borders

In the wake of the Second World War, the Adriatic region became the southern maritime extension of the “Iron Curtain” that separated Europe, as the case of the “Free Territory of Trieste” (1947-1954) epitomizes. Trieste was part and parcel of a broader economic Adriatic region that was in turn historically connected to other Mediterranean and Central European markets. Although the Cold War brought about new mechanisms of border control, surveillance and intelligence, as well as the militarization of space, commodities continued to circulate between states. The economies resulting from such circuits were at the same time highly surveilled and suspected of being illicit. Contraband, speculation, smuggling, and trafficking were often used to categorize shady material transactions across borders, and institutions produced reports and sources linking suspicious commodities to suspicious individuals and networks.

This panel uses commodities to investigate how Southeast European geographic margins such as the Adriatic became pivotal in military and strategic terms in the historical setting resulting from the end of the World War and the emerging Cold War. Elaborating on the theme of the last Rencontres balkaniques (“Balkans connectés”), this proposal makes a decisive step further in discussing spatial and economic connectivity (and restrictions over it) in material and economic terms through the suspicious flow of commodities. Thereby we draw especially from one of the themes prioritized in the Call for Papers, Materials, energies, flows, although our topic is also linked to Biographies, social lives and itineraries of things as well as Systems of objects, production and consumption. The organizers will present two papers: One will be on the illicit market of American cigarettes in the Yugoslav-Italian border region around Trieste in the early 1950s, a form of trafficking with high political stakes that linked the contested Free Territory to other settings like the International Zone of Tanger (GUIDI). The other paper will be on the cross-border flows of materials needed for the postwar (re)construction of energy supply infrastructures in the Free Territory of Trieste (RUTAR).

We have a Northern Adriatic focus linked to the history of socialist Yugoslavia, but case studies on other settings from postwar Dalmatia to Albania (as well as Greece) are welcome to open comparative perspectives. We are particularly interested in how studies on a maritime space contribute to approaching border regimes and socio-economic transformations. By looking closely at how commodities moved – means of transportations, administrative documents, actors involved –, our panel raises questions about the spatial categories that historians apply to commodities (“flows”, “circulations”) and to the interplay between regulation (new laws and measures), surveillance (domestic or foreign reports, incidents, police and military intervention), and the illegalization – or ex post legalization – of commodities.

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De/constructing the Material Memory of Non-Aligned Yugoslavia

Milena Jokanović, University of Belgrade – Faculty of Philosophy, Seminar for Museology and Heritology

The method – or rather the metaphor – of the biography of things, recognized in both anthropological (Appadurai, Kopytoff) and archaeological studies (Marshal, Godsen) as well as in museological theory (Poulot, Vasiljević), helps us understand the interconnections, coexistence, and relationships between people and things over time. It enables us to recognize how certain objects, throughout their life, accumulate meanings and become valuable to individuals or communities, while others are revalued (Nietzsche, Broch) discarded, and left to float in the limbo of oblivion (Thompson, Augé) or, in the case of museum collections, fall into the archaeological context of the object (Van Mensch). Suggesting that collections should be viewed through history, focusing on semiophoras – objects that, besides their utilitarian value, also carry external symbolic meanings - Pomian points out that in different periods, naturally, different objects become semiophoras. The transformation of collections and the incorporation of new objects into them reflect cultural, historical, epistemic, political, and socio-economic changes. Nevertheless, what potential for new interpretations and insights do museum exhibitions offer when, almost by chance, they persist despite profound ideological shifts and significant social changes? What knowledge can we accumulate in the contemporary era by tracing the encounters of these in-between visible and invisible objects with different epochs?

The starting symbolic and real spatial point of our research is the Brijuni archipelago and the exhibition setups from the 1980s, which remain almost unchanged to this day. During the period of almost 50 years when the island was a second home and a working cabinet of Josip Broz Tito, Brijuni became globally known as „Tito's Brioni“. This Balkan archipelago in the Mediterranean was historically and geostrategically always important, which is why Tito has chosen it to be the new center of international politics, i.e. Non-Aligned Movement. The policy of Non-Alignment implied balancing in the tense zone of different geopolitical relations, „between the alleged capitalist 'core' of the global system, the socialist 'semi-periphery' and the post-colonial 'periphery’ “(Stubbs). The two exhibitions in our focus, are the rare museological and historical examples showcasing the significance of Socialist Yugoslavia in the NAM. They are sources of specific knowledge of internationalism, anti-colonialism and humanism, which is more than necessary in today's global politics.

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Balkan BlingBling: Jewelry in the third spaces of the post-Yugoslav periphery

Olivera Jokić, City University of New York New York, NY, USA

Mišo Kapetanović Austrian Academy of Sciences Vienna, Austria 

This panel explores how jewelry, ornaments, and other small artifacts mediate the reconfiguration of identities, social hierarchies, and publics in the post-Yugoslav context. Against the backdrop of post-socialist transition, migration, and the region’s semi-peripheral status, we trace the “afterlives” of objects as they move across new landscapes and contexts, exerting force and creating new forms of sociability. By focusing on the symbolic and affective dimensions of material culture, we ask: How do these objects help reconstitute “third spaces” where marginalized groups—such as queer diasporas, Roma communities, peasants, or working-class individuals—negotiate their place within shifting centers and peripheries? What can the material practices of these groups reveal about the tensions between mainstream prestige and fringe counterpublics? The panel investigates how objects like jewelry, once embedded in the broader imagined community such as Yugoslavia, now circulate in spaces such as Viennese dance clubs, illegal village pubs, and urban markets, creating new publics and redefining taste, value, and belonging. For instance, how does the use of “bling” in queer immigrant spaces challenge or reinforce existing hierarchies? What makes a collection of discarded objects in a rural pub feel like a museum, and what does this reveal about nostalgia and marginalization? Drawing on Daniel Miller’s insights into the relational agency of objects (1987, 2005) and Bruno Latour’s challenges to the limits of material subjectivity, we examine how material culture becomes a forcefield for reimagining political and social spheres in the Balkans. The panel proposes to trace the lives of these things across the theaters and landscapes in which they now appear, to see what kind of force they exert now when they get people to converge around them in new ways and new places. It explores how material culture serves as a lens for understanding the ongoing transformations in post-Yugoslav societies, particularly the emergence of what Nancy Fraser calls “subaltern counterpublics.” By focusing on the interplay between objects, identities, and spaces, we reveal how marginalized groups use material practices to navigate displacement, diaspora, and ongoing structures of exclusion. The panel invites contributions from anthropology, history, gender studies, sociology, literature studies, and related disciplines. We welcome papers that explore the meanings, powers, and circulations of jewelry and other artifacts in third spaces such as clubs, bars, markets, and parks. Through interdisciplinary dialogue, we aim to bridge Balkan political theory with everyday material practices, offering new insights into the region’s complex social landscapes.

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(Re)composing Balkan Radioscapes: Materiality, Mobility and Circulation of Radio Sounds and Radio Archives

Aliki Angelidou, Associate Professor in Social Anthropology, Panteion University, Athens

Alexandra Balandina, Associate Professor in Ethnomusicology, Ionian University, Greece

Olivier Givre, Associate Professor in Social Anthropology, Université Lumière-Lyon 2

Georgia Sarikoudi, Independent Researcher

This panel investigates the materiality of radio history by exploring the archival and ephemeral dimensions of sound, questioning how we engage with the act of listening and the sonic past. It approaches radioscapes as dynamic milieus where sound production, transmission, reception, and regulation interact within specific social, political, and technological contexts. It explores radio as a space where voices, music, noise, and silence are curated, contested, and reconfigured—whether through state control, commercial interests, community initiatives, or digital disruptions. The panel also aims to investigate processes by which sound history circulates, materializes, and fades over time, juxtaposing theoretical approaches to the act of listening with material analyses to examine how memory, soundscapes, and historical narratives are constructed and mediated. Radio, as both a medium and an artifact, occupies a unique position at the intersection of the tangible and intangible. While sound itself is ephemeral, it leaves material traces—recordings, scripts, and broadcasting equipment—that constitute archives of mobility, circulation, and historical memory.

Key questions for this panel include:

• How do we conceptualize the materiality of sound within radio history?

• What are the methodological and theoretical challenges in bridging the gap between listening as an ephemeral act and the material traces of sound?

• How do radio archives embody or resist the dichotomy between the tangible (physical media) and the intangible (live broadcasts and listening experiences)?

• In what ways does the circulation of radio sound—across borders, ideologies, and cultural landscapes—reveal the mobilities of its historical context?

• Can we listen to political, social, and environmental change through the interplay of diverse broadcasting practices? How are radioscapes of/in transition shaped by interactions and frictions between multiple sonic and media communities?

Potential Discussion Topics:

• Theoretical frameworks for understanding the materiality of sound and listening

• Circulation and mobilities of radio sound in historical and geopolitical contexts

• Preservation of radio archives and the fading materiality of sound recordings

• Radio as a medium of cultural hybridity, community-building, and identity formation

• Methodologies for studying ephemeral sound histories and their material remains

This panel aims to bridge the gap between sound studies, media history, and material culture by inviting scholars to reflect on the materialities of radio sound and its historical significance.

We welcome interdisciplinary contributions from anthropology, ethnomusicology, media studies, sound studies, and cultural history. Emphasizing both historical and contemporary perspectives, the panel seeks to address the methodological and theoretical challenges of researching Balkan radioscapes and encourages innovative approaches that engage with listening as an analytical and creative practice.