Water, Memory, Imagination: a response to Mostar, Sarajevo and Srebrenica

It was late, late in the evening,    The lovers they were gone; The clocks had ceased their chiming,    And the deep river ran on. (W.H. Auden) During the CHCI-Mellon Crises of Democracy Summer School in Dubrovnik, I was given a unique opportunity to look into a wide range of global issues from many angles in…

Building Knowledge Through Solidarity Networks

We were asked to write a blog post regarding our time at the GHI but I was not sure on what to write about. We were together for nine days, and I was affected in many ways during that time. I came back home and the sense of being part of something powerful was still…

A Researcher’s Experience of the Global Humanities Institute

It was truly a pleasure to participate in the 2019 CHCI-Mellon Crises of Democracy Global Humanities Institute in Dubrovnik. We were a mix of capable people coming from various locations, bringing with us a variety of individual experiences, societal issues and theoretical/empirical perspectives. This type of setting brings with itself the risk of creating a…

Learning to Remember

Within the framework of the CHCI-Mellon Crises of Democracy GHI 2019, our field trip to Bosnia and Herzegovina indeed became a tough experience of site-situated learning, as later on reported by many participants, me included. On that July weekend, I pondered a lot the pedagogy of looking and the politics of un-seeing. Indeed, we all…

The Human Experience of Political Crisis

Throughout the Institute, our discussions never strayed far from the human experience of political crisis. Reminders from the dance scholars in our midst about the inescapable physical manifestation of trauma, workshops about how to conduct oral histories, testimony from our tour guide in Dubrovnik and a survivor of Srebrenica, pockmarked stone and man-made memorials in…