Picturing Modernist Future: Women Illustrators and Childhood Conceptions in Socialist Yugoslavia (follow up)

Project activities:

1) Friday, 13.9.2024, 13h

Paper presentation at international conference “War and theatre – A Backward Glance”,  12.–13.10.2024, Kino Šiška, Center urbane kulture Kino Šiška, Trg prekomorskih brigad 3, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia

»The Little Prince« Defies Silence. Literary Agency After Migration: Ismet Bekrić, Šimo Ešić, Valerija Skrinjar-Tvrz

Based on interviews with authors and editors of children’s literature, mainly from Bosnia and Herzegovina, who continued their lives and creative paths either in Slovenia or Germany as a result of the war (1992–1995), this paper will analyse the ways and spaces of establishing as well as hindering authorial agency in exile. Following the professional trajectories of children’s writers and editors Ismet Bekrić (1943–), Šimo Ešić (1954–) and Valerija Skrinjar Tvrz (1928–2023), the author will shed light on the institutional forms of production structures, the problems within them, and ask questions about the ideological regimes of the field of intellectual activity in Slovenia and Germany since the 1990s. In this way, the paper will also provide insights into the heterogeneous ways of (non)confronting the fact of the brutal war in Bosnia and Herzegovina within the Slovenian cultural field of the 1990s.

https://maska.si/en/project/war-and-theater-a-backward-glance/

2) Wednesday, 9.10.2024, 12.30

Guest lecture by  Elena Messner (University of Vienna, University of Klagenfurt): Translation of international literature in the interwar Yugoslav feminist magazine Žena danas, Institute of Culture and Memory Studies ZRC SAZU (Trg francoske revolucije 7, 2. floor)

The translation work in the magazine Žena danas (1936–1940) was linked not only to feminist, but also to Marxist and anti-fascist ideals. The translation work was an activist canonisation process that spread the global feminist-anti-fascist discourse through translations in Yugoslavia. It contained feminist-subversive elements as well as elements that did not escape the patriarchal or hegemonic  discourse. What can we learn from this case in terms of feminist theories of translation?

Elena Messner (b. 1983 in Klagenfurt), grew up in Klagenfurt, Ljubljana and Salzburg. She studied Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of Vienna and carried out a number of research projects and guest studies in Zagreb, Sarajevo, Belgrade and Aix-en-Provence, where she also taught at the University of Aix-Marseille. Since 2023, she has been a Senior Scientist (FWF) at the University of Vienna, researching in the Department of Slavonic Studies. Elena Messner teaches at the University of Klagenfurt and is also active as a writer, translator, curator and editor.

https://ikss.zrc-sazu.si/en/dogodki/translation-of-international-literature-in-the-interwar-yugoslav-feminist-magazine-zena

https://www.elena-messner.com/

3) Wednesday, 9.10.2024, 17.00

Presentation of publications by Časopis za kritiko znanosti: Feminism, Art, Literature and The Kurdish Women's Movement, as part of the 30th City of Women Festival, ŠKUC Gallery, Stari trg 21, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia

The introduction of the two new publications of the ČKZ journal is centred around the thematic issue of the ČKZ Feminism, Art, Literature, co-edited by dr. Katja Kobolt and dr. Petja Grafenauer, as well as the monograph The Kurdish Women's Movement by Dilar Dirik. Drawing from the post-Yugoslav space, Feminism, Art, Literature places the artistic, literary and, on a wider scale, intellectual work in materiality and sociality, revealing the ways in which they are and have been constituted as spaces where feminism is established as an ideological, methodological, affective and political intervention. In her monograph The Kurdish Women's Movement, sociologist and feminist Dilar Dirik presents not only the history and current practices of the revolutionary Kurdish women's movement, but also the possibilities for political action, including the importance of revolution for women's movements around the world today. Her main objective is to present the purpose of the revolutionary Kurdish women's freedom movement and the scope of its political vision, from the perspective of the movement itself and drawing on its practices, with the hope and desire to build bridges between the different fights for freedom.

Drawing from their own work, the participating women authors, editors and translators questioned the ways and the significance of the past and current feminism in the search for answers to the question of how and where to continue?

https://mestozensk.org/en/festival/2024/dogodek/119498

4) Friday, 11.10.2024, 13.30
Paper presentation at the international symposium “Youth Music since 1945 & Jeunesse Musicale”, Academy of Music, Palača Kazina, Kongresni trg 1, 1000 Ljubljana, Marijan Lipovšek Hall, Slovenia

Mira Voglar and Lidija Osterc: an art-educational tandem encouraging relationships through literary, visual, sound and haptic experiences  

Mira Voglar (1935–), a musicologist, music pedagogue and poet, and Lidija Osterc (1928–2006), a painter and, above all, an illustrator and pedagogue, belonged to the few established artistic tandems for children in Slovenia. Their joint teaching engagement at the Secondary School of Education in Ljubljana led them to create original publications for children, parents and educators. Drawing on the conversation with Mira Voglar as well as her professional discourse on music and aesthetic education, this paper presents selected works of this artistic duo. Their books, like Čirule čarole(1966), Biba buba baja (1979) and Bibarije: pesmi – igre – slike (1982), mix words, sounds, rhythm and pictures to create a sense of touch and movement through abstract shapes, coloured surfaces and the construction of space. The paratextual elements are aimed at adults reading poems and riddles to and with children, and encourage rhythmic touch. The works by Mira Voglar and Lidija Osterc thus represent a programmatic model of a literary-visual-auditory-haptic experience through which readers - children and adults - connect.

Programme: https://docs.google.com/document/d/14hqsIsyjW4bN15v-1U79MEzUPw_qyxQQTD9sGr0-fpM/edit?tab=t.0

Abstracts: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1HFT7_z09_ftB3DYpZipABxJq01kdkCzAM9g9aqpWjWA/edit?tab=t.0

5) Tuesday, 25.3.2025, 14.45 – 16.15 

Participation in a panel discussion »Academic Mobility and Mental Health: Challenges and Opportunities«, 24.–28.03.2025, Marie Curie Alumni Association. Croatian, Hungarian, Slovenia and Western Balkan Chapter joint event / UNIN International Week 2025, University North, Varaždin, Jurja Križanića 31b, 42000 Varaždin, Croatia. 

Participation in a roundtable discussion on various aspects of academic mobility and mental health issues: personal experiences, academic, non-academic, and cross-sectoral spheres—specifics and similarities: working conditions and mental health, gender, social and cultural context, being a foreigner/visitor in a research organization, work and private life, parenthood, motherhood, and infrastructure.

6) Saturday, 21.06.2025, 15.00–17.00

Presentation at and moderation of a panel at the 27th Biennial Conference of the International Research Society for Children's Literature (IRSCL): Borders, Migrations and Liminality, June 21–25, 2025, University of Salamanca, Hospedaria Fonesca, Salamanca, Spain.

More Than Mothers – Spaces of Socialist Sociality 

Based on a multimodal analysis of the organization of space in selected works by Ela Peroci, illustrated by Ančka Gošnik Godec in various editions, and with the help of Henri Lefebvre’s and Homi Bhabha's conceptualizations of space, the presentation focused on the roles and organization of social reproduction as presented in selected children's books. Particular attention was paid to socialist constructions of motherhood, childhood, and women’s authorship (for children): What does the presented organization of spaces of motherhood and of women’s authorship tell us about Yugoslav socialist society and culture, as well as the historical ideas on and the position of women and children within them? The presentation was part of the panel "Third Spaces in Yugoslav and Post-Yugoslav Children's Literature: Different Perspectives," initiated by Dr. Katja Kobolt in collaboration with researchers Dr. Dubravka Zima and Dr. Jelena Lalatović, Croatia; and Dr. Tijana Tropin, Serbia.

Programme: https://irscl2025salamanca.usal.es/

Abstracts: https://virtual.oxfordabstracts.com/event/52281/submission/312

7) Wednesday, 27.8.2025, 13.30–15.30

Invited lecture at the 3rd interdisciplinary summer schools in humantities “Crossing media boundaries. Gender and writing across artistic media”, organized by The University of Nova Gorica, CEEUPS network Women Writers in History and Women Writers Route Association, University of Nova Gorica, Vipavska cesta 13, Nova Gorica, Slovenia. 

Children's literature and gender: The lens of social reproduction

In the course of modernisation and democratisation processes since the late 19th and especially in the 20th century, women in Europe gradually entered the public sphere and thus also literature and art. In Southeast Europe, particularly in Slovenia, it was children’s literature, in which women writers and artists were able to showcase their creativity and pursue creative work for children as productive work. The reasons and structures that supported the opening up of literary and artistic production for children, also to women art and cultural workers, to a much greater extent than has been the case with the autonomous “high” arts (for adults) are manifold: from ideological, class-cultural-structural-historical reasons that construct and delegate women in natural proximity to children, as well as to material and temporal dimensions of (work in) children’s literature, and not least because of the continuing special status of the institution of autonomous 'high' arts.

In the lecture the conceptual lens of social reproduction was used to provide insights into thr research in socialist children's literature and the reasons for the relative feminisation of cultural production for children. Using selected examples from the growing online collection of Yugoslav women illustrators (hdl.handle.net/20.500.12102/A2.788), the analytical focus was paid to the organisation of reproductive work or care work in relation to artistic work as productive work. 

https://women-writers.net/summer-school-2025-crossing-media-boundaries/

8) Wednesday,17.09.2025, 14.30–15.00

Presentation of a paper at the 10th scientific conference “Research in Education and Training: The Decline of Various Forms of Literacy in Slovenia – Challenges and Opportunities”,17.–18.9.2025, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana, Aškerčeva 2, Ljubljana, Slovenia.

How to address war and promote peace with children? The (un)exploited potential of literary history on war for peace (and its exploration).

In addition to the nearly half a billion children whose lives are directly affected by war today (UNICEF), children are confronted with the mediatizations of wars framed in the so-called "military-entertainment complex" ("Militaintment," Mirrlees 2020): global media systems including social networks, video games, the film industry, etc. While wars are depicted everywhere, children's education struggles to address with children wars in a way that would strengthen peace. In the past, in post-war Europe and also in Slovenia, which was part of socialist Yugoslavia (1945–1991), education and multilingual cultural education were central pillars of peace education (UNESCO 2002, 8), with the digital revolution and shifts in memory politics, it seems that children's culture about war has lost its significance in peace education. Despite recommendations for interdisciplinary integration (Žbogar 2024), curricula, lists of compulsory and recommended fiction, and library shelves no longer include works on war, especially from Slovenian and former Yugoslav literary and cultural history for children. On the shelves of school and public libraries are also missing works in the native languages of most immigrant children in Slovenia. Based on research into children's and youth literature from the socialist era, two of the fundamental motifs of which were the experience of war and, in particular, children in war, the article problematises the (non)addressing of war with children through the history of children's literature about war. Based on the findings of the role of culture in peace education an critical analysis of past academic discourses on children’s war literature, the contribution articulates proposals for the inclusion of children's literature about war for interdisciplinary integration with the goals of peace education.

https://www.pei.si/konferenca-2025/

9) Friday, 26.09.2025, 15.45–17.45

Presentation of a paper at the international scientific conference of the Association of French Balkan Studies, “Balkan Matters! Material Cultures in the Balkans,” September 25–27, 2025, MUCEM, J4 Fort Saint-Jean, Marseille, France.

“Where have all the books gone?”: Children’s books as mnemonic objects

Departing from the question on today’s places of and for children’s books from the Yugoslav socialist past, the paper proposes a discussion on these “homeless” and “silenced” objects and their ideological, mnemonic, (infra)structural, affective and epistemic afterlives. The “century of the child”, proclaimed by Ellen Key in 1900, really dawned in the Balkans only with the socialist modernisation processes in the second half of the 20th century and it coincided with the century of the book. Children’s books – at the time a mass medium – accompanied children as they grew up. Along with the technological, infrastructural, economic and social development children’s books took then a prominent place among childhood objects: as an educational, ideological, aesthetic, affective and relational object. As an object to be “used” – held, touched, observed, read (also aloud), flipped, learned, sung, danced, drawn or even touched after and sometimes coloured, often in the company of adults – children's book has been a “capsule of materiality” to be spatiotemporally and relationally enacted as a “plaything” in an “embodied-meaning making process” (Veryeri Alaca 2019) producing a situated sociality. 

Despite the fact that children’s books from the socialist period, are only in rare and most prominent (and fantastic) cases, reissued children’s books from the socialist past can however become also “disobedient objects” or “counter memorials” (Young 1992), enabling the observation of mnemonic practises working against hegemonic cultural politics.

https://mucem.org/en/evenement/balkan-matters-material-cultures-in-the-balkans/