We are very happy to be co-hosting a talk on 30th April by Professor Jasmina Husanović, the IASH-SSPS Fellow 2025-26. Jasmina will talk about her research on, and involvement with, environmental and socially reproductive struggles in Bosnia and Herzegovina. All are welcome to attend.
Commoning the Social, Enacting Communality in Bosnia and Herzegovina: On Methods and Forms of Emancipatory Political Action
Professor Jasmina Husanović
IASH-SSPS Fellow, University of Edinburgh & University of Tuzla, Bosnia and Herzegovina
30 April 2025
3:00–5:00 PM // G.8 Gaddum Lecture Theatre, 1 George Square (Neuroscience)
Co-hosted by the Department of Social Anthropology, the Edinburgh Environmental Humanities Network (EEHN), and CRITIQUE
Over the past three decades, social movements, grassroots activism, and knowledge and cultural production in Bosnia and Herzegovina have navigated the politics of trauma, revolt, and care in pursuit of social justice—whether in its intersecting dimensions of “transitional justice” and reconciliation, or in struggles for gender, labor, and environmental justice. These persistent efforts to reimagine the commons and forge social bonds through collective practices of solidarity stand in opposition to the neoliberal and ethnocapitalist governance of life, marked by what Berardi (2011, 13) calls the “slow cancellation of the future.” A critical reappraisal of these movements is essential, particularly in terms of their methods and forms of emancipatory politics, which can be seen as an ongoing praxis of the undercommons (Moten & Harney 2013) and infra-politics (Mitropoulos 2012, 116-118).
Within the broader context of ethnocapitalist and neoliberal governance in the Western Balkans—functioning as a regime of racial colonial capitalism (Rexhepi 2022, Gržinić et al. 2020) or what Fraser (2022) terms “cannibal capitalism”—this talk examines instances of communality that traverse the political and biosocial corruption of brutal institutions and institutionalities (Ferreira da Silva 2021, 7). Drawing on materialist political ecologies, Black radical thought, and Marxist and decolonial feminism, I explore how particular forms of political organising—such as the plenum, zbor (community assembly), protest, and collaborative platforms in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the wider region—serve as infrastructural modalities of transformative social change. These practices challenge conventional notions of political and social organisation, agency, and temporality, advancing new vocabularies and practices of social literacy and political praxis.
How do such practices engender bonds, imaginaries, and languages that collectivise time, energy, and infrastructure for political action, resisting a regime of knowledge, truth, and power that “delights in accumulation by dispossession and profits from ecocidal and genocidal practices” (McKittrick 2021, 74)? Addressing this question invites us to rethink the possibilities of commoning the social through emancipatory political action against the extractivist, expropriating, contractual, colonial, and ultimately antisocial logic of ethnocapitalist/neoliberal governance of life.
Biography:
Jasmina Husanović is a scholar and activist whose interdisciplinary work spans cultural, political and ecofeminist thought and emancipatory practice in Bosnia and Herzegovina and beyond. She is a Full Professor of Cultural Studies and Gender Studies at the University of Tuzla, Bosnia and Herzegovina. She earned her PhD in 2003 at the Aberystwyth University, UK. Her research interests are in the field of cultural and political theory dealing with the politics of witnessing, equality and solidarity, governance of life and culture of trauma, and emancipatory politics in the intersecting public spaces of cultural and knowledge production and grassroots activism. She has published widely both nationally and internationally on these topics, and her most recent monograph is Culture, Community and Activism in Bosnia and Herzegovina: Emancipatory Trajectories (Tuzla, 2020). She has been involved in various local and international interdisciplinary platforms concerned with the politics of the common good and transformative social change, including environmental justice. Amongst other things, she is the founder of the platform for ecofeminist engagement in Bosnia and Herzegovina EKOFEM BiH.
