Carolyn Defrin, PhD (Centre for Southeast European Studies)

This exploratory research aims to conceptualize a mobile museum of migration futures, shifting from traditional museum practices focusing on past and present crises to envisioning migration through dignity, compassion, and connection. Current migration-related exhibitions tend to frame migration as a static crisis, emphasizing trauma and displacement through artefacts like lost shoes or graffitied border wall fragments. This project, however, aligns with decolonial museum practices that involve marginalized communities in programming but takes it a step further by focusing on the future. 

Informed by current research on the role of speculative design in facilitating inter-relational dialogue and understanding between key actors in Southern European border contexts, this grant  offers a key research phase for a new and larger follow-on project exploring how museum spaces can co-create dignified migratory futures in collaboration with refugee and migrant artists, curators, and community members in wider global border contexts. 

To develop this concept, this period of research is focused on engagement with arts and community initiatives along the US/Mexico border, a critical border site and the origin of border art practices; but, which has remained disconnected from its European counterpart in research and art practices. Visiting this region will enable connections and new insights to develop the envisioned museum. 

Oana Hergenröther (treffpunkt sprachen - Zentrum für Sprache, Plurilingualismus und Fachdidaktik)

This project explores intersections of masculine identity with chronological and cultural aging. Three in-depth narrative interviews with older male Serbian filmmakers—Goran Marković, Emir Kusturica, and Želimir Žilnik— and archival research at the Yugoslav Film Archive will ask how the aging process and narratives about the life course have found their way into art; how they interact with political engagement, aesthetic transformations parallel to the artists’ own chronological aging; and how they function as subtle metaphors for wider social issues like generational conflict and solidarity. Serbia’s current political and cultural climate, (still) widely dominated by (aging) male figures, is a prolific field for inquiries into real and artistic practices of patriarchy and gender roles. Marković, Kusturica, and Žilnik are chosen based on their regional and international success and visibility, but also considering their diverging aesthetics, personal histories, political views. The combined close reading of the recorded interviews, and the archival research exploring the quantitative and qualitative presence of the topics of age and aging in secondary sources about Yugoslav/Serbian film, will showcase artistic negotiations of tropes such as the aging body, sexuality and virility; fathering, grandfathering, mentoring; male stock characters; interrelations between violence, war, and masculinity.

Derya Özkaya (Zentrum für Südosteuropastudien)

The socio-political transformations in Southeast Europe, intertwined with demographic changes like depopulation and migration, hold significance for Europe. Yet, the role of ageing population amidst these transformations remains underexplored. Directing attention to the often-overlooked experiences of older adults’ political engagement, this exploratory research focuses on the intersections of age, gender, and protest for democratization in Southeast Europe. Aiming to deconstruct widespread portrayals of older adults in a "decline" of the political agency, it examines grassroots movements in Turkey, Austria, Bosnia Herzegovina, and Serbia, particularly focusing on older women's roles in social and ecological justice movements. The study seeks to uncover their motivations for collective action in their later lives, strategies for democratization from below, and challenges in forming and sustaining alliances within and across different movements. In addition to contributing to the critical ageing and gender studies and protest movement scholarship from Southeast European societies, this exploratory research aims to lay the groundwork for a coherent framework to prepare a successful application for a broader research project. In line with this expected outcome, the exploratory research will involve conducting a comprehensive literature review, archival research, and exploratory field visits with preliminary interviews to inform the selection of empirical cases.

Chiara Pagano (Zentrum für Südosteuropastudien)

Focusing on the reconfiguration of Italy’s borderscaping across the Central Mediterranean from 2015 to 2024, this project investigates southern European (re)bordering practices, including the de facto retraction of the EU's external borders within southern European spatialities and their concomitant extensions beyond EU geographies. Expanding on previous research conducted from 2018 to 2019 in Italy and Tunisia, this study examines the evolving dynamics of Italy’s border management in light of significant recent developments. The European Agenda on Migration and the Hotspot Approach, launched in 2015 and implemented in Italy in 2016, aimed to streamline the processing of new arrivals, namely through mainstreaming the sorting out potential asylum seekers as opposed to so-called “economic migrants” already from the moment of their arrival. However, this new system was soon confronted with new challenges connected to the COVID-19 pandemic and, later on, due to political shifts, including the 2022 election of the right-wing government led by Giorgia Meloni. Additionally, EU negotiations on the New Pact on Migration and Asylum and attempts to establish off-shore processing of asylum requests have further complicated the landscape, with Italy increasingly aspiring to a leading role in informing European negotiations for bilateral agreements with neighboring “Third countries”, such as Albania, Tunisia, and Egypt. This research will involve site visits to major ports and hotspot structures in central and southern Italy, including Sicily and Lampedusa, and interviews with key stakeholders. The goal is to reassess and update previous findings, offering a comprehensive understanding of Italy’s border management strategies and their broader implications for the Euro-African Mediterranean.

Tatjana Petzer (Institut für Slawistik)

With the spatial turn in the humanities, the binary relationship between land and sea has become broadly applied in the topographical and geo-aesthetic analysis of text and image. The dichotomy does not only divide Utopian insularity from landlocked locality, but, according to the political theorist Carl Schmitt, rather indicates the fundamental opposition between the telluric and thalassic spheres of the world order. Drawn by this controversial constitutional lawyer during World War II, the telluric-maritime paradigm had its revival in the conservative thought of New Right intellectualism. The project examines the reception of Schmitt’s geopolitical values in South-Eastern Europe from the forties to the nineties, and in the current politically tense situation, when they become popular again via the doctrine of Neo-Eurasianism. By approaching the cultural semantics of Schmitt’s “Raumordnung” (nomos) in discourse and arts in general, and of the Adriatic and its hinterland in particular, the project will analyze the continuities and ruptures of continental and maritime order structures in South Slavic spatial discourse and how they took part in the conceptualization of Europe.