Political Possibility and Historical Transformation
I have a long-standing and ongoing interest in the possibilities and limits of intentional transformation in moments of upheaval. This is driven by the fact that most of my research focuses on Bosnia and Herzegovina, a place variously characterized as post-war, post-socialist, and post-Yugoslav – all imperfect terms that attempt to capture the kinds of historical change people must confront, shape, and resist as they navigate Bosnian politics and society.
Much of my work has thus focused on the historical imagination (how people conceive of history) and its relationship with the political imagination (how people conceive what is politically possible and necessary) – both in war, in its aftermath, and in the wake of Yugoslav state socialism. Together with colleagues from Europe and North America I have sought to chart new directions for post-socialist studies, questioned the usefulness of the term post-socialism itself, and written of the inadequacies of the nostalgia concept in researching how people respond to and shape historical transformation.
More recently, I have investigated the conditions that create openings and closures to political experimentation and social transformation, focusing on a series of worker-initiated protests and their aftermath in the late industrial Bosnian city of Tuzla. This has led primarily to the Reclaiming Dita project, but also includes articles on the political affordances of football fandom, and reviews, a photo-essay, and other writing on the various tactics employed by workers and their allies.
I gratefully acknowledge the financial support provided to this research by the International Research and Exchanges Board, American Councils, American Councils for Learned Societies, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, and the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada.