Research activity information

• Re-routing Eastern European whiteness: relational racialisation and historical proximity

  Špela Drnovšek Zorko

  Lead, May 2024, Off white Central and Eastern Europe and the global history of race, 311 - 327, No password, International magazine

  [Invited]

  In book

  添付ファイルのURL


• The Language of Here: Tukaj smo

  Špela Drnovšek Zorko

  Lead, University of Ljubljana, Oct. 2022, Andragoška spoznanja, 28(2) (2), 141 - 144, No password, International magazine

  [Invited]

  Scientific journal

  添付ファイルのURL


• Relational Debris: Notes Toward a Research Methodology of Postness

  Špela Drnovšek Zorko

  Lead, Nov. 2021, Artha Journal of Social Sciences, 20(2) (2), No password, International magazine

  [Refereed][Invited]

  Scientific journal

  添付ファイルのURL


• Guarding the “Balkan Route” on the postsocialist frontier: revisiting Maja Weiss’ Varuh meje (2002)

  Catherine Baker, Marianna Szczygielska, Špela Drnovšek Zorko

  Informa UK Limited, Oct. 2021, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 23(5) (5), 811 - 828, No password, International magazine, Co-authored internationally

  Scientific journal

  添付ファイルのURL


• Comparing the racialization of Central-East European migrants in Japan and the UK

  Špela Drnovšek Zorko, Miloš Debnár

  Abstract The article deploys the lens of the race-migration nexus (Erel et al., Ethnic and Racial Studies 39:1339–1360, 2016) to compare the racialization of migrants in the UK and Japan. It draws on qualitative data on the experiences of Central-East European (CEE) migrants in the two countries to unpack how whiteness is constructed in relation to different histories and patterns of immigration in each national context. While CEE migrants in Japan benefit from being perceived as implicitly white and Western ‘foreigners’, their whiteness represents a form of enduring exclusion from the ethno-nationalist Japanese society. In the UK, changing political contexts and internal European hierarchies of whiteness contribute to CEE migrants’ ambiguous position in an increasingly anti-migrant society. By comparing the mechanisms of racialization in each country through the analytics of visibility and exclusion, the article furthers ongoing debates about the intersections of race and migration. It furthermore extends the comparative analysis of whiteness to a non-Western setting, making a significant contribution to the study of local/global articulations of race.

  Lead, Springer Science and Business Media LLC, Jul. 2021, Comparative Migration Studies, 9(1) (1), 1 - 17, No password, International magazine

  [Refereed]

  Scientific journal

  添付ファイルのURL


• Cultures of risk: On generative uncertainty and intergenerational memory in post-Yugoslav migrant narratives

  Špela Drnovšek Zorko

  The disintegration of Yugoslavia not only marked the end of a decades-long socialist multinational project, but also reorganised former Yugoslavs’ possibilities for imagining certain futures. This article examines intergenerational narratives of rupture amongst migrant families living in Britain, showing how uncertain pasts produce distinctly diasporic post-Yugoslav cultures of risk. Unlike sociological accounts of risk that foreground the conditions of late Western modernity, this approach to risk is grounded in collective experiences of late socialism, violent state collapse, and unexpected migration, as well as intergenerational experiences of migration and settlement in Britain. The article puts forth two main arguments. On the one hand, British-born children of former Yugoslav migrants ‘inherit’ and re-narrate their families’ stories of rupture, which transform the specific events of the 1990s into narratives of potentially universal existential uncertainty. While future uncertainty cannot be avoided, it can be partly mitigated by focusing on the present. On the other hand, both parents and children invoke the more positive aspects of risk when they imagine optimistic mobile futures for the younger generation. Here young people’s diasporic hybridity, another inheritance of post-Yugoslav migrations, is favourably contrasted with the postsocialist ‘stuckedness’ that characterises much of the post-Yugoslav space. By focusing on the multi-temporal and generative qualities of narrative uncertainty, the article proposes that intergenerational stories of rupture can contribute valuable interpretive resources for dealing with open-ended futures, both within and beyond migrant communities.

  Lead, SAGE Publications, Jun. 2020, The Sociological Review, 68(6) (6), 1322 - 1337, No password, International magazine

  [Refereed]

  Scientific journal

  添付ファイルのURL


• Uneasy solidarities? Migrant encounters between postsocialism and postcolonialism

  Špela Drnovšek Zorko

  Lead, Mar. 2019, dVersia: Special issue “Decolonial theory and practice in South-East Europe”, 3.19, 151 - 167, No password, International magazine

  [Invited]

  Research society

  添付ファイルのURL


• Articulations of race and genealogies of encounter among former Yugoslav migrants in Britain

  Špela Drnovšek Zorko

  Lead, Informa UK Limited, Jul. 2018, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 42(9) (9), 1574 - 1591, No password, International magazine

  [Refereed]

  Scientific journal

  添付ファイルのURL


• See(m)ing strange: Methodologies of memory and home

  Špela Drnovšek Zorko

  Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s work on the stranger and Anne-Marie Fortier’s approach to remembering home, this article argues for a methodology of memory and migration that would explore individuals’ encounters between lived spatio-temporalities without affirming a migrant ontology. I look to my ethnographic research on diasporic narratives among migrants from the former Yugoslavia in the United Kingdom to ask how recounted memories of home might be bound up in, but not confined to, the experience of migration. Exploring mnemonic journeys that go beyond dichotomies of displaced origins and strange new homelands, I suggest that stories of embodied sensory experience can make visible people’s encounters with forms of difference: both in the past home, which loses its ontological fixity, and in the process of inhabiting a ‘diaspora space’, which comes with its own narratives and trajectories of being a stranger.

  Lead, Intellect, Apr. 2016, Crossings: Journal of Migration and Culture, 7(1) (1), 81 - 95, No password, International magazine

  [Refereed]

  Scientific journal

  添付ファイルのURL


• Diasporic Memory and Narratives of Spatiotemporality

  Špela Drnovšek Zorko

  Drawing on the experience of an ongoing ethnographic project on family stories of socialist Yugoslavia, this paper asks how diasporic narratives might be located at various points of imagined spatiotemporalities. I examine some of the ways in which anthropology has dealt with cultural time, in order to see how the intergenerational narration of time might be co-constitutive of spaces of diaspora. Thinking about the ways in which both academic and commonplace discourses have shaped the expected narrative of the Yugoslav past, I also ask whether we might effect a more nuanced approach to analyzing how grounded, present-day experiences of diaspora space come to relationally construct other places and other times.

  Lead, {DE} {GRUYTER}, Dec. 2014, Symbolism 14: An International Annual of Critical Aesthetics. Special Focus: Symbols of Diaspora, 14, 43 - 58, No password, International magazine

  [Invited]

  Scientific journal

  添付ファイルのURL

• Re-rooting marigolds and methodologies: Unpacking the ambivalent proximities of Eastern European whiteness

  Jul. 2024, Reading Decoloniality


• “please use your discretion to adjust your hope”

  Jun. 2022, Allegra Lab: Anthropology for Radical Optimism

  Others


• On Maja Zeco’s ‘In Search of the Sun’

  2022, Lux Scotland

  Introduction commerce magazine

• (Re-)routing as Methodology: Unpacking the Ambivalent Proximities of Eastern European Whiteness,

  Reading Decoloniality reading group, Jul. 2024

  [Invited]


• ‘Eastern European’ in Japan? Refracted geographies of ‘Eastness’

  Eastern Europe–Global Area colloquium series, Apr. 2024, Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography, International conference

  [Invited]


• A racialized politics of presence? The openings and closings of reading the postsocialist into a postcolonial migration story

  Aux Marges de l’Empire: Postsocialisme et Postcolonialité, Mar. 2024, University of Sussex, International conference

  [Invited]


• Who are ‘Eastern Europeans’? …and other stories

  Invisible Grammars of Resistance? Political Subjectivities after East-West Migration, Nov. 2023, University of Sussex, International conference

  [Invited]


• East of when, post where? ‘Eastern Europeanness’ and travelling racial imaginaries

  Lecture Series on Colonialism, Borders and Migration, University of Cambridge Centre for the Study of Global Human Movement, Jun. 2023, University of Cambridge, International conference

  [Invited]

  Keynote oral presentation


• Dialoguing ‘postness’ across postcolonial and postsocialist geographies

  Henriette Herz Lecture, May 2023, Katholische Universität Eichstätt–Ingolstadt, Eichstätt, International conference

  [Invited]


• Toward a postsocialist politics of presence?

  Post-Socialism, Migration and Memory in Britain and Beyond Webinar Series, May 2023, University of Birmingham, International conference


• Racialisation and/as translation? Eastern European migrants’ racial subjectivities beyond the metaphor of ‘in-betweenness’

  Regional Studies Association 2022 Central and Eastern European Conference, "Bridging Old and New Divides–Global Dynamics & Regional Transformations", Sep. 2022, International conference


• Bridging and dividing Europe–Central Europe, Brexit, and Covid 19

  Regional Studies Association (RSA) Central and Eastern European Conference pre-conference virtual event, Jun. 2022, International conference

  [Invited]


• What’s ‘postsocialist’ about Eastern Europeans? Untangling migrant narratives of whiteness, Eastern Europeanness, and (post)socialism in the UK

  Nordic Summer University Winter Symposium on Whiteness, Racialization and (Post-)Soviet Pasts, Apr. 2022, International conference


• Contingent past, uncertain future: Postsocialist migrant narratives as resources for dealing with open-ended futures

  British Sociological Association 2022 Annual Conference, Apr. 2021, International conference


• Race, class, and the postsocialist migrant

  Conjunctural Geographies of Postsocialist and Postcolonial Conditions: Theory Thirty Years after 1989, May 2020, Institute for Regional Geography and Leibniz Science Campus Eastern Europe–Global Area, International conference


• Migrant translations of race and diversity between Bulgaria and London

  New and Old Migrations and Diversities in the UK and Japan, Dec. 2019, Waseda University, Domestic conference


• When everything changed: reading post-Yugoslav family histories for the post-Brexit nation

  Royal Geographical Society-Institute of British Geographers (RGS-IBG) Annual Conference, Aug. 2019, International conference


• Re-routing East European socialism, historicising diasporic whiteness

  Historicizing ‘Whiteness’ in Eastern Europe and Russia, Jun. 2019, Institute for Political Research, Bucharest, International conference


• Translating ‘race’ and coevalness between postsocialist and postcolonial Europe

  British International Studies Association (BISA) Annual Conference, Jun. 2019, International conference


• Routes to coevalness: generation and migration after Yugoslavia

  Department of Anthropology and Sociology Seminar Series, Oct. 2018, SOAS University of London, International conference

  [Invited]


• 'I know what happened’: diasporic origin and/as intergenerational knowledge

  European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) Annual Conference, Aug. 2018, Stockholm University, International conference


• Sounding it out: audible encounters with post-Yugoslav cultural intimacy

  International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (IUAES) World Congress, Jul. 2018, Federal University of Santa Catarina, Florianópolis, International conference


• A special place? Race, migration, and genealogies of encounter

  British International Studies Association (BISA) Annual Conference, Jun. 2018, International conference

  [Invited]


• 'We’ve always had the same attitude': on translating ‘Bosnia’ into ‘Britain’ among former Yugoslav migrants

  Apr. 2018, International conference


• Genealogies of encounter: race and coloniality among (Central-)East European migrants in Britain

  Department of Social Anthropology Seminar Series, Mar. 2018, Stockholm University, International conference

  [Invited]


• Legacies of encounter as queer epistemology

  Challenges in Queer and Feminist Migration and Diaspora Studies, Jul. 2017, International conference

  [Invited]


• ‘Don't think that everything is for certain’: encountering post-Yugoslav pasts in a British future

  Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and Commonwealth (ASA) Annual Conference–Footprints and Futures: The Time of Anthropology, Jul. 2016, Durham University, International conference


• Same place, same thing? Throwntogetherness in the diasporic narratives of post-Yugoslav others

  American Anthropological Association (AAA) Soyuz Symposium, "Politics of Difference: Migration, Nation, Postsocialist Left and Right", Mar. 2016, University of Chicago, International conference


• The afterlife of ‘Yugoslavia’? On diasporic narratives and an intergenerational politics of significance

  CEIFO Seminar Series on Transnational Migration, Mar. 2015, Stockholm University, International conference

  [Invited]


• Mobile memory, mobile space: methodologies of narrative and movement

  Memory on the Move workshop, In Search of Transcultural Memory in Europe (ISTME) Conference, Sep. 2014, International conference


• The reluctant insider? Studying the politics of belonging among former Yugoslavs in the United Kingdom

  Practical and Ethical Dilemmas Facing Researchers from Central and Eastern Europe Based at UK Universities and Studying Central and Eastern Europe, Jul. 2013, University of Bath


• The interpretation of family stories in the British-Yugoslav diaspora(s)

  Life Narratives: Memory, Citizenship, Gender, Jan. 2013, Utrecht University, International conference


• Misunderstanding in the ethnographic politics of hearing

  European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) Annual Conference, Jul. 2012, Paris West University Nanterre La Défense, International conference


• Telling lives: the framing and reception of narratives in Yugoslav refugee families

  Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and Commonwealth (ASA) Annual Conference, Apr. 2012, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, International conference


• Transgressing borders: the case of Tanja Ostojić

  Carnival of Feminist Cultural Activism, Mar. 2011, University of York, International conference

• British Sociological Association

• Comparing migrant narratives of race, migration, and belonging

  Špela Drnovšek Zorko

  Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS), Postdoctoral Fellowship for Research in Japan (Short-term), Waseda University, Apr. 2022 - Apr. 2023, Principal investigator


• Toward a diasporic postsocialism: race, migration, and genealogies of encounter

  Špela Drnovšek Zorko

  Leverhulme Trust, Early Career Fellowship, University of Warwick, Oct. 2017 - Oct. 2020, Principal investigator


• Diasporic Constructions of Home and Belonging

  European Commission Seventh Framework Programme, Marie Curie Initial Training Network, SOAS University of London, Others