Dimensions of Europe Lunch Lecture - Tatjana Rosić-Ilić

LOVE AS A POLITICAL FORCE AND THE NEW LANDSCAPE OF CULTURE OF RESISTANCE IN EUROPE: STUDENT PROTESTS IN SERBIA 2024-2025

The 2024–2025 student movement in Serbia represents a significant social and cultural phenomenon that challenges dominant forms of political communication. It reveals new forms of collective action and expression, particularly among youth, as well as previously unseen alliances across ideological and class lines. Students define their protests as people’s liberation efforts, blending anticolonial and anti-neoliberal critiques with national sovereignty struggles. Emerging amid long-term legal suspension and necropolitical governance (Mbembe), it exposes contradictions in resisting the “politics of death” while introducing a distinctive rhetoric of the “mobilization of love,” reframing love as a political force. The new language of student resistance departs from conventional political discourse: symbolic acts, such as student collective walks between cities, and the use of national symbolism combined with guerrilla strategies, generate emotional cohesion despite ideological diversity. The “mobilization of love” activates economic, physical, psychological and emotional resources of citizens, creating movement infrastructures and heightening social awareness of Serbia’s political crisis. 

The lecture will analyze the cultural, communicative, and aesthetic modalities through which the “mobilization of love” materializes itself. These modalities—manifest in protest soundscapes, social media practices, visual iconography, and the performative choreography of student marches—constitute a semiotic and affective infrastructure that enables solidarity, empathy, and recognition as operative forces of social transformation. At the same time, these modalities establish a completely new language of the culture of resistance. The dissemination of this language occurs primarily through digital networks—especially student plenums’ Instagram accounts, creating what Castells terms “networked resistance.” 

Leaderless and slow-burning, based in the idea of plenary democracy, the student movement in Serbia transforms the existing resistance practices and opens up a different kind of political and cultural imagination of the European present and the social reality we inhabit. At the same time, it asks for a re-examination of the European tradition of resistance and the ways it is reactivated amid the pressing political and social questions of our time, transferring the new knowledge of societal change and offering a new type of culture of resistance for Europe and its semi-periphery.

Tatjana Rosić-Ilić is currently Independent scholar. She was Full Professor at the Faculty of Media and Communications, Singidunum University, Belgrade where she thought courses in literature, gender and media studies. She was also visiting professor at the PhD Program at Philological-Art School, University of Kragujevac. She was dismissed from both positions during summer 2025 after she was fired from Faculty of Media and Communications because of support to student protests in Serbia. 

Tatjana was Visiting professor at Department of Slavic Literatures and Languages, Michigan University, USA during 2016/17 academic year. As author, and coordinator she participated in numerous national, regional, and international projects related to gender, cultural and media policy issues. She has published her work in relevant professional and magazines.  Her current field of research is focused on literary, gender and media in the context of (post)Yugoslav studies. Tatjana Rosic Ilic is author of following books: Ed. Representation of Gender Minority Groups in Media: Serbia,Montenegro,Macedonia, Belgrade: 2015; (Anti)utopije tela: reprezentacija maskuliniteta u savremenoj srpskoj prozi (Dystopias of the Bodies: Representation of Masculinity in Contemporary Serbian Prose), Beolgrade: 2014 ; Mit o savršenoj biografiji: Danilo Kiš i figura pisca u srpskoj kulturi (The Myth on Perfect Biography: Danilo Kis and the Figure of the Writer in Serbian Culture), Belgrade : 2008; Ed. Theory and Politics of Gender: the Representation of Gender Identities in Literatures and Cultures of Balkans and Southeastern Europe, Belgrade:2008; Proizvoljnost dnevnika (The Arbitrariness of Diary), Belgrade, 1994.