Affective Collective: In the Name of Production, or Protest as Method

This talk brings into focus some universal lessons and theoretical insights based on the experience of protests and plenums in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Various similar interventions into conflict and social justice in the former Yugoslav region, as well as internationally, are challenging the governance of trauma and destitution with its old and new forms of political and economic authority and rationality, including adjacent forms of alienation permeating the social fabric. The affective turn in humanities and social sciences sheds crucial light on the politics and economies of emotions in contemporary grassroots social movements and workers' struggles which transgress the logic of victimization as commodification and instead protest for production. Also, the attempts to reconsider, reimagine and redo the questions of method have underpinned such promising interventions in empowering transformative collective agencies and imaginaries locally (e.g. DITA Factory, Workers' University). In this sense, the problem of “affective collective” leads us to the issue of infrastructure in a novel and prescient way that repoliticizes the means of producing collective political protest today, and methods necessary for it.

Jasmina Husanović (Husanovic-Pehar) is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Tuzla, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and chair of Cultural Studies. She earned her PhD in 2003 at the Department of International Politics, University of Wales, Aberystwyth, UK, with a thesis entitled, “Recasting Political Community and Emancipatory Politics: Reflections on Bosnia.” Her research interests are in cultural and political theory and praxis dealing with the politics of witnessing, equality and solidarity, governance of life and culture of trauma, as well as emancipatory politics with a focus on intersecting public spaces of cultural and knowledge production (critical pedagogies in art, education and activism). She has published widely on these themes in the post-Yugoslav region and internationally, including a monograph, two co-edited volumes and numerous articles in scholarly journals and edited volumes. She is currently engaged in various teaching, publishing and research initiatives and platforms regionally and internationally concerning the issues of memory, trauma, violence, solidarity and social justice.