Yugoslav (Re)Visions II: Bullies Flying into Oblivion: Art, Activism, and Direct Democracy in the Student Protests in Serbia

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

On November 1, 2024, the concrete canopy fell off the newly reconstructed Novi Sad train station killing 15 people. This tragedy generated protests against the corruption and incompetence of the Serbian government, which is increasingly revealing its autocratic face. By the end of February 2025, hundreds of thousands of Serbian people, led by university students, continue daily protests in the streets across the country, despite being exposed to government bullies' physical attacks, regime media targeting, and illegal Secret Service interrogations and detentions. By using documentary media evidence, video recordings, and media theories, the first paper of this panel deals with the ramificiations of practices of direct democracy for Serbian politics, the silence of the majority of global media not reporting on them, as well as the clear distinctions between these protests and the student protests during the regime of Slobodan Milošević 1996/97. The second paper, drawing on the close reading of the seminal handbooks emerged during the students protest in Belgrade and Zagreb from the last two decades, exposes the practices of plenum as a narrative structure but also as a "revolutionary machine" of direct democracy and social change. The third paper wraps up the panel by examining the multimedia artistic activism in the context of the student protests. It focuses on the series of visual poetry works by the Belgrade-based art collective Škart, which reveals the systemic dysfunctionality of the state.

Sub Unit

• Anthropology, Cultural Studies

Chair

• Julija Pesic, U of Toronto (Canada)

Papers

• Pumping it Up: Serbian Student Protests Three Decades Apart - Tatjana Aleksic, U of Michigan

• Plenum as Narrative (Structure): Student Protests in Serbia 2024-25 - Tatjana Rosic Ilic

• Wake Up, Fight for Your Dreams: Škart’s Visual Poetry and Student Protests in Serbia 2025 - Goran Lazicic, U of Graz (Austria)

Discussant

• Elena Messner, U of Vienna (Austria)