Tanja Petrovic

Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts | ZRC SAZU · Institute of Culture and Memory Studies ZRC SAZU

The compulsory service for young men in the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA) created bonds across ethnic, religious, and social lines. These bonds persisted even after the horrific violence of the 1990s, in which many of these men found themselves on opposite sides of the front lines. In Utopia of the Uniform, Tanja Petrovic draws on memories and mater...

Based on a study of gender equality issues in a research organisation in an Eastern European post-socialist country, the paper argues that the increasing precariousness of academic employment and project-based work lead to workplace dynamics that must be considered in a specific setting. The results of a survey of employees at ZRC SAZU show how one...

This article is devoted to the meanings of the liminality that shaped the (self-) perception of the Croatian city of Pula and came as a result of the long-term presence of the military (and heavy industry) in the city. The study discusses the modalities of cohabitation of the Yugoslav People’s Army and the citizens of Pula, who lived together, inte...

This essay takes as a starting point the concrete event from August 1959, when a five-member delegation of Cuban revolutionaries and politicians led by the extraordinary ambassador, major Dr. Ernesto Guevara Serna visited socialist Yugoslavia. The delegation of Cuban revolutionaries stayed in Yugoslavia for ten days and visited Belgrade, Avala, Kra...

A massive natural disaster hit Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina in May 2014. Disastrous floods followed several days of torrential rains. Whole towns and villages were devastated; thousands of people were displaced. Experts estimate the material damage in the billions of US dollars. Both human and countless animal lives have been lost. For th...

By comparing the dominant media and academic readings of the visual archive of Yugoslav non-aligned internationalism with the interpretations of the corresponding visual archive of the Bandung Conference, I reflect on the impossibility of recognizing the futurity, solidarity, and alternative modernity in the photographs depicting Yugoslav internati...

This article draws on experiences in implementing the Gender Equality Plan adopted at the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts in early 2019. It discusses the careers of female researchers, their prospects for career advancement, and how their excellence is construed, negotiated, and promoted in the Slovenian academic spher...

A contribution to the omnibus text "Understanding Southeastern Europe and the Former Yugoslavia (De)Colonising Socialist Experience" by Oto Luthar, Tanja Petrović and Florian Bieber, in: From the Highlands to Hollywood: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Southeastern Europe Festschrift for Karl Kaser and SEEHA, 2020

This essay seeks to deepen our understanding of women's agency in socialist societies. Focusing on socialist and post-socialist Slovenia, it explores the ways agency reveals itself in interviews with and biographical portraits of the socio-politically active women - or "political workers" (politične delavke), as they were called during Yugoslav soc...

The article discusses the social world formed around canneries in small coastal and insular towns in the northeastern Adriatic. Although associated with hard, unpleasant labor and demanding work conditions, the fish canning industry, particularly in the period of late socialism, offered a framework in which a meaningful social life was organized an...

The article discusses the social world formed around canneries in small coastal and insular towns in the northeastern Adriatic. Although associated with hard, unpleasant labor and demanding work conditions, the fish canning industry, particularly in the period of late socialism, offered a framework in which a meaningful social life was organized an...

This article offers insight into the meanings of the unprecedented political potential of humor in the early twenty-first century by discussing three parodic forms of contemporary political humor: carnivalesque politics, parodic reworkings of political discourses, and political protests and satirical activism. Revealing how political parody both pr...

With the increasing importance of cultural heritage and its role in contemporary societies, 1 an increasing number of researchers and heritage experts are calling for an understanding of heritage that would more adequately reflect the complex and often contested social processes and engagements with the past and be more sensitive to the needs, visi...

The Serbian Orthodox community in the Bela Krajina region in southern Slovenia, which presently consists of four villages (Bojanci, Milici, Marindol and Paunovici), is considered the northernmost "island" of the Serbian Orthodox population and has traditionally been approached through the ideological lenses of locality, authenticity (or lack of the...

The article outlines the attitude of the Serbian nation, whose identity is to a great extent built on the belonging to Orthodox Christendom, towards Muslims - both towards Albanians, who are perceived as "undeniably other," as well as those who arc perceived as "less other," such as the Gorani in Kosovo and the Bosniaks in the region of Sandzak and...

Eight life stories of peasant women from Serbia born in the 1920s and 1930s serve as a basis for analyzing two phenomena characteristic of the Serbian patriarchal family: marriage against the woman's will and her subordinate position in the family. The analysis points to the ways in which the women themselves perceive these phenomena and to verbal...

The article deals with ideological functions of direct and indirect speech the discursive forms which, due to their reflexive potential, enable speakers to express their views on social reality through language use. The use of reported speech combined with code switching enables speakers to establish various relations and attitudes towards other me...

The study of linguistic ideology, which can be defined as sets of beliefs about language articulated by users and observers as a rationalization or justification of perceived language structure and use, could be a source of valuable information on identity strategies in the Balkans. I will try to determine the relation between linguistic ideologies...

The paper aims at presenting the current ethno linguistic situation in four Orthodox Serbian villages in the Bela Krajina region of Slovenia. Ethno linguistic material collected in these villages enables the synchronic state of traditional culture to be established. Special attention is payed to the way the interviewees describe Christmas rituals a...