Annual workshop: Worlding from South East Europe, remaking international relations

Organised by the BISA South East Europe Working Group, this workshop brings together scholars and practitioners from across the region to explore contemporary developments in South East Europe. It foregrounds diverse theoretical, methodological, and empirical approaches that challenge dominant modes of knowledge production in international relations. The workshop welcomes extended abstracts and provides dedicated support for early career researchers in developing their work towards submission to the BISA annual conference and eventual scholarly publication. 

Programme: 

12:00 – 12:15  Welcome and Introductions

12:15 – 13:30  Gendered Struggles, Memories, and Agencies

Facilitator: Elena Stavrevska (University of Bristol)

Juliana Ajdini (University of Tirana)

Cleaning the Gaps: Gendered Informality and the Everyday Struggles of Domestic Workers in Urban Albania

Lara Husar (Erasmus Mundus CEERES Programme)

Through Her Eyes: Gendered Memories of Migration: A Case Study of Yugoslav Women Migrants in West Germany

Jeta Rexha (University of Münster)

Navigating Post-independence Kosova through Activist’s Disappointment 

13:30 – 13:45 Break

13:30 – 15:15 : Europeanness, Enlargement, and the Politics of Belonging

Facilitator: Mate Subašić (Liverpool John Moores University) 

Fjolla Ceku Sylejmani (University of Graz)

Kosovo and the EU: Contesting Europeanness through Communication Discourse 

Tara Tepavac and Ivana Milićević (University of Belgrade)

Enlargement Debates: Discourses of Europeanness in the EU and the Western Balkans 

Magdalena König (Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law)

The Risks of the Eternal Waiting Room of EU Enlargement: A Case Study of Serbia-EU Relations

15:15 – 15:30 Break

15:30 – 16:45  Contested Pasts and International Futures: Memory, Heritage, and Diplomacy in SEE

Facilitator: Catherine Baker (University of Hull)

Ivan Nikolovski (Central European University)

Selectively Remembered Colonial and Forgotten Anti-Colonial Pasts? The Memory of European Colonialism and EU Memory Politics in a Changing International Order

Jelena Kupsjak (University of Zadar)

Fragments from the Archive: Tracing the Infrastructures of Interwar Medical Diplomacy 

Kividi Ramalya Koralage (Aberystwyth University)

Reconstructing Memory and Space: The Neoliberal Transformation of Post-Socialist and Post-Yugoslav Heritage in the Balkans 

16:45 – 17:00  Concluding remarks

Registration will close two hours before the event begins