Masterclass: International Women's Day

Marking International Women's Day, CIP affiliate Dr Safet HadžiMuhamedović welcomes special guest Dr Marija Grujić for a Religion and Conflict Masterclass:

Oscillations of Belonging in the Narratives about the Kosovo/Serbia Conflict over Territory   

Can a myth start a war? Do people belong to territory, or does territory belong to people? In this talk, Dr Grujić will discuss these questions by drawing on research conducted among Kosovo Serb refugees and her NGO and IO engagements.

Serb nationalists have argued that a specific group belongs and others do not belong in Kosovo based on an assumed primordial linkage of all Serbs to a designated ethno-national homeland. The 1989-1999 Kosovo/Serbia conflict-induced displacements complicated this premise, as Kosovo Albanian nationalists understood Serbia as Kosovo Serbs’ supposed homeland. While there is a rich scholarship on how nationalists and the Serbian Orthodox Church representatives fostered hegemonic politics, we know little about the effect of their views on people who experienced different types of losses due to the conflict. The talk aims to show how applying feminist-intersectional methodology can foster a better understanding of different types of gendering in the context of national myth-making and protracted displacements resulting from the myth of return.

About the speaker

Dr Marija Grujić is a sociologist of gender and migration with an interdisciplinary academic background and cross-sectoral professional experience in the EU and Western Balkans. She holds a PhD in Sociology from Goethe University Frankfurt and has obtained degrees in philosophy (BA, Belgrade University) and religious studies (MSc, Sarajevo University). Currently, she is pursuing postdoctoral study on gendering asylum infrastructures at the European University of Viadrian.

Marija’s expertise is in questions about belonging in internal (protracted) displacement, intersectionality, irregular migration decision-making and the role of gender norms in displacements/emplacements. Marija held Lecturer and Researcher posts in academia (Goethe University Frankfurt) and NGO sectors, including the International Center for Migration Policy Development (ICMPD), based in Vienna, with operations spread over 90 countries worldwide. Presently, Marija is finalising a book manuscript, “Belonging in unhomely homelands,”. By introducing a novel framework of ‘oscillations of belonging’, it deals with gendered aspects of refugees’ coping with multiple losses; the monograph is forthcoming in Berghahn Books.

Who should join this Masterclass?

This event is intended primarily for students in the Faculty of Divinity. Participation will be of particular value for those pursuing the MPhil Pathway in Religion and Conflict and the module Contemporary religious conflict: Ethnographic approaches.

The event is open to others to audit. Please direct any queries to Dr HadžiMuhamedović.