Historical interpretations of the 20th century

Research program “Historical interpretations of the Twentieth Century”

The main emphasis of the program is on the questions concerning the historicisation of watershed events and processes that took place in the previous century in Slovenia and other parts of the former SFR Yugoslavia as well as in the wider area of central and south-eastern Europe.

Our perspective deliberately avoids the normative, teleological conceptions of the inescapable course of history, and the known projections of the results of historical processes.

• We continue our research on the cultural memory of wars and violence in general by paying particular attention to the curricula in educational and cultural institutions (schools, libraries, museums) as well as other educational policies, mass media, arts, and commemorative strategies.

• We follow current discussions in the history, theory, and philosophy of historiography. Concrete assignments, which we will support to the extent possible by obtaining national and international research projects, centre on (i) the analysis of revisionist rhetoric in Slovenia and internationally. Special consideration is given to (ii) thehistoriographical conceptualisation and instrumentalisation of the concept of crisis and to (iii) the selected examples of artistic reflection on violence. We furthermore aim to (iv) develop a conceptual apparatus for understanding the emergence of new social movements in Slovenia and the former Yugoslavia in the 1970s and 1980s.

• Specifically, we address the questions of imagining and constructing the past, those of (controlling and) communicating the present and, consequently, also the questions of envisioning the future.
  • At the practical level, this research segment will be carried out by analysing the dimensions of industrial objects which, in their invisible daily existence, act as media through which people create, think, and give meaning to the world. Within this context, the (media and industrial) technologies, at once enabling and hindering human activity, are viewed as a pivotal part of material and symbolic construction of the world, activity, and hence memory.
  • In relation to the socialist industrial heritage, we continue to pursue the already established studies of workers’ memories with an emphasis on their experience of the former social status and the loss thereof.
  • Due consideration is also given to the project of socialist travelogs, with which we aim to reflect on and challenge the predominant paradigm of Yugoslavia’s non-alignment. The latter will be addressed through a comparative analysis of attempts to overcome colonial practices and through an analysis of discourses and policies advocating the continuity of (neo)colonial practices.

• We build on the existing ethnographic and archival research on the socialist policy of amateurism, with a particular focus on the interplay, communication, and exchange between “amateur” and “professional” spheres of cultural engagement or, more specifically, between amateurs and professional artists.

We do so bearing in mind the emancipatory mission of culture in socialism, which was based on social ownership of cultural activities and sought to abolish class differences and commoditisation of cultural activity. In studying the latter, close attention will be paid to the strategies used by cultural industries that have a decisive influence on the current forms of cultural production. In parallel, we will reconstruct the roles of historicisation of socialist cultural infrastructures and seek to determine the meaning and value of amateur as well as cultural and (applied) art practices.

• Consideration is given to the significance of cultural heritage and ways of evaluating (i.e., heritaging) the 20th-century accomplishments in local and global perspectives, through different interpretations and instrumentalisations of cultural heritage. Within this framework, we will be interested in the roles of local, state, and European (economic and political) centres on one hand, while addressing the power(lessness) of the profession as well as the importance of local initiatives and methods of spontaneous and organised engagement on the other. In the following five-year period, examples for studying individual forms and practices of preserving and appropriating cultural heritage will be sought especially in the Gorica region, the Karst, and the Vipava Valley. It is also for this reason that we will consider different periods in the contemporary history of these parts of Slovenia, which have largely been marked by the political and cultural influences of the neighbouring Italy.

• From the outset, special focus is therefore on the discourse study in the context of nationality and other forms of collectivity. We are interested in the language, images, and structures of archaic and past media, compared to the language of new media and the digital discourses of social networks. The latter have a crucial influence on the understanding of social embeddedness, such as class and gender, as well as sexual orientation and all other aspects of life in Slovenian society at the time of the establishment of Yugoslavia as well as during and after its socialist period.

• A separate study will be conducted on the intellectual history of women and the history of feminist thought, specifically by analysing the conditions for intellectual work. Specifically, we will reconstruct the situation of women scientists as well as women intellectual and cultural workers as well as gender equality policies from the enactment of women’s suffrage onward. Within this context, we will focus on the conceptualisations of intellectual and creative activity, particularly in relation to social productive work.

• Within the framework of Nova Gorica part of the programme group, which provides the BA study programme Cultural History and the MA study programme Humanities Studies (course Histories and Cultures of Cross-Border Spaces) at the University of Nova Gorica, we continue our cultural-historical and literary research, related to digital repositories (Pisma, NEWW Women Writers), as well as with gender and intercultural contact studies.