Zala Volčič
Biographic Data
| ID | 672681 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Zala Volčič |
| GIVEN NAMES | Zala |
| FAMILY NAME | Volčič |
| SIGNATURE | VOLČIČ Z |
| AFFILIATIONS | The University of Queensland |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2154-4520 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 38 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 120 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 37 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2004 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Meaningful conversations and connections
We focus on the role that relationship-led academic development can play in building belonging and a sense of collegial purpose amongst university educators. Acknowledging university educators’ complex work, we summarise one particular initiative, implemented in 2023, that aims to promote care, connection and collaboration among first-year unit coordinators at one of Australia’s largest universities. We see first-year units as crucial in forming …
‘I have stopped … listening to the radio and haven't been going on any news channels online’
Democracy depends on an information environment in which the media provide relevant news and information to citizens who are interested in public issues and willing to become knowledgeable about what is happening in society. In this article, we analyse Australians’ narratives about their daily social media use patterns. We first map media-related challenges that face democratic societies. Then we analyse, based on our original qualitative researc…
No Media literacy without civic literacy
The article discusses the results of an empirical study that indicated commercial and social media use correlates with lower civic values and lower support for citizenship education fundamental to democratic citizenship. The research is based on original quantitative and qualitative research, conducted in 2024, that included 10 focus groups of 65 participants, and surveyed 2046 Australians, on their media habits, and civic attitudes. Our data rev…
Automated Parasociality
Recent developments in AI promise to further enact the shift from personalization to personification in automated digital interfaces. We have already seen the rise of virtual influencers and, more recently, of chatbots that adopt the personas of celebrities. Drawing on the intertwined history of the relationship between parasociality and personal influence, we frame the shift toward personification as a strategy for re-centralizing control over t…
Automated media and commercial populism
This article considers the link between the increasingly important role of automated information curation online and the rise of what we call ‘commercial populism’. We invoke the term to refer to the convergence of populism as a marketing tool – a way of selling, for example, nutritional supplements or survivalist merchandise – with political strategies that cater to the citizen as consumer (whose freedoms are framed in the individual register of…
Intercultural communication during pandemic
The article explores how intercultural relations can be fostered at the level of an undergraduate university degree during the pandemic. It offers one specific intervention within intercultural education to provide new ways of thinking about how intercultural relations can and do happen. By drawing on the self-reflexive narratives of the article's authors – a university lecturer and three students – we consider the ways in which intercultural edu…
Constructing Transnational Divas
This chapter shows how Ceca, a Balkan singer, leverages her iconic national status in redefining herself as a borderless celebrity. In a transnational media environment, characterized by the cross-border movement of people, cultural artifacts, and ideas, Ceca emerges as a borderless celebrity with iconic standing in all former Yugoslav countries. Despite the fact that her musical career is perceived to be caught up in the corruption, ethnic clean…
Virtual Empathy
This article offers a theoretical response to the recent interest in virtual reality (VR) as a technology for enhancing empathy. It argues that the version of empathy envisioned by the champions of the technology—one in which care for the other is a function of being able to collapse the other’s experience into one’s own—runs counter to the very concept of empathy, as originally construed, which preserves otherness in its alterity. The point is n…
Smart” Cameras and the Operational Enclosure
Concerns about the impending implementation of facial recognition technology in public and shared spaces go beyond privacy to include the changing relationship between space and power. This article explores the relationship between automated identification and social sorting, decision-making, and response. To develop a theoretical framework for considering the ways in which facial recognition technology reconfigures power relations, the article c…
Geographies of Crime and Justice in Bosnia and Herzegovina
Buck-Morss 1983; Innis 1951; Lefebvre 1991; Soja 1989; Thrift 2002). The identity of spaces is very much connected to the histories which are recounted about them, how those histories are narrated and which interpretation of history becomes dominant. Hundreds of diverse locations across today's Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) are associated with the armed conflicts of the the 1990s — these are the spaces that witnessed rape, torture and massacres. S…
Commercial Nationalism
This book intervenes in discussions of the fate of nationalism and national identity by exploring the relationship between state appropriation of marketing and branding strategies on the one hand, and
Watching Pink Reality TV
In the post-socialist, post-war, neo-liberal, commercial media landscape in the former Yugoslavia, ethno-national, heterosexual femininity continues to be a dominant frame of reference. This article explores how the portrayal of gender is closely connected to ethno-nationalism on one of the most popular reality TV shows, The Palace, produced by the Serbian commercial broadcaster Pink TV. We analyse how female audiences in Bosnia and Herzegovina r…
Transnational celebrity activism in Bosnia and Herzegovina
This article focuses on the local understandings, responses and interpretations of celebrity activist Angelina Jolie and the film she directed in 2011 about the war rapes in Bosnia and Herzegovina: In the land of Blood and Honey. We first provide a brief historical context of the production and promotion of the film. Next, we offer a theoretical approach to the phenomenon of celebrity activism. In the third part, we look at how Jolie’s film has b…
Connecting the Disconnected
This article looks at the emergence and potentials of a Balkan cultural studies. I argue that the productivity of a Balkan cultural studies lies in its willingness to engage with popular culture as a very real political force in the revolutionary transformations from the 1980s on. Some recent cultural developments are presented here to show how the mix of culture and cultural studies contributes to the political relevance and academic vibrancy of…
Branding Post-War Sarajevo
After the violent wars of the 1990s, Bosnia and Herzegovina is heavily promoting its tourism industry with the capital city of Sarajevo as the prime destination. Sarajevo became a city of death during 1992–1995, and its siege remains etched in local and global memories as a time of bombing, horrific shelling of locals, and brutal destruction of the city's cultural heritage. Today Sarajevo faces many dilemmas, including how to remember the 1990s t…
I Want to Leave Slovenia for a Sunny, Relaxed and Open Australia
This article deals with the imagery of 'Australia' in contemporary Slovenia. In an analysis of both Slovene media texts and interviews with 32 Slovenes who want to immigrate to Australia, we explore a constructed image of Australia. We closely consider the symbolic imagery that shapes our informants' discourses about Australia in order to focus on sociocultural elements of migration, where the imagination plays a key role. We suggest that a close…
Hybridisation of Slovene Public Broadcasting
Public broadcasting institutions have existed as central and publicly funded national institutions, providing services in the public interest. The coincidence of technological, political and economic circumstances in the last 20 years or so, however, has challenged their monopoly position. Technological developments - specifically digitalisation - have expanded spectrum availability. In some cases, public television has been commercialised, priva…
Commercial and sexualized nationalism on Serbian reality TV
This article explores the way in which the portrayal of gender becomes linked to that of ethno-nationalism on the popular Serbian reality show The Palace. On the basis of a textual analysis of the public reactions to the reality show and its interpretations by the local audiences in Slovenia and Serbia, we claim that the show promotes specifically gendered and sexualized ethno-national identities, and that the interpretation of the show continues…
Fame on the Farm
Introduction In autumn 2009, the Slovene commercial broadcaster POP TV built on the success of its popular reality format The Farm (Kmetija) by creating a celebrity version of the show. Like its predecessor, Celebrity Farm tapped into a sense of national identity rooted in the values and community o
Information Literacy
Today, some of the most prominent policies in schools throughout the (post)industrialized world, and especially in developing Central and Eastern European countries, relate to the rapid introduction of information and communication technologies (ICTs). The concept of “information literacy” is the most common rationale for introducing educational ICTs. This concept is so poorly defined that it may best be investigated as a form of ideology. The ar…
Target’, ‘cancer’ and ‘warrior’
Children born of war rapes continue to be a marginalized political, media and academic topic in Bosnian and other post-war societies. The goal of this article is to contribute to the research that deals with the life situations of children born of war rape, and to show the usefulness of an analysis of metaphors when a specific topic is emotionally difficult to talk about. The metaphor analysis of life stories of 19 adolescents — all Bosniak girls…
Living With the Sins of Their Fathers
Children born of war rape continue to be a taboo theme in many post-war societies, also in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BH). This study is based on in-depth interviews with eleven adolescents born of war rape in BH. The main goal is to present how these adolescents represent themselves and their life-situations. On the basis of the research we identify four key themes: 1) their continued sense of hostility even after the end of the war; 2) the interna…
The Paradox of Ceca and the Turbo-Folk Audience
After the Yugoslav wars and the fall of Milosevic regime in 2000, Ceca, despite her ties to Serbian nationalism, became one of the most popular Balkan turbo-folk singers. While analyzing Ceca, the authors try to account for this paradoxical popularity while contributing to an understanding of the relationship between popular culture and politics in the former Yugoslavia. On the basis of in-depth interviews with young female students in the two mo…
That’s Me
In this article, we consider the themes and reception of To Sam Ja ( That’s Me) , a Big Brother–style Balkan reality TV show filmed in Macedonia in 2004 and 2005 that featured several cast members from former Yugoslav republics living together. Drawing on examples taken from the production and reception of To Sam Ja, we explore the way in which the show manages political and economic conflicts by transposing them into the realm of the personal
A Slovene president's self-help discourse
In this article we examine the self-help discourses in Slovene President Drnovsek's blog, which he uses as the main tool to communicate with the Slovene public. On the basis of a critical discourse analysis of Drnovsek's writings, we argue that Drnovsek recontextualises Slovene political discourse and replaces it with a particular type of therapeutic discourse. We explore Drnovsek's self-help discourse as a way of approaching some issues associat…
War on terrorism’ as a discursive battleground
In different parts of the world the 9/11 terrorist attacks have been localized and negotiated by mainstream media and in other public discourses in rather diverse ways. This article explores how young Serbian intellectuals recontextualized G.W. Bush's ‘war on terrorism’ discourse in order to legitimize, retroactively, Serbian violence against Muslims in Bosnia and Kosovo during the 1990s. We go beyond Bernstein's concept of recontextualization, d…
Former Yugoslavia On the World Wide Web
Since the violent collapse of former Yugoslavia, the `new' nation-states of Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Kosovo, Montenegro and Macedonia have attempted to position themselves on the global map while seeking to create a distinctive `brand' (national) identity. Drawing on a textual analysis of their official governmental websites, this article explores how these former Yugoslav states use the Internet to create and represent …
Living With the Sins of Their Fathers
Children born of war rape continue to be a taboo theme in many post-war societies, also in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BH). This study is based on in-depth interviews with eleven adolescents born of war rape in BH. The main goal is to present how these adolescents represent themselves and their life-situations. On the basis of the research we identify four key themes: 1) their continued sense of hostility even after the end of the war; 2) the interna…
The notion of ‘the West’ in the Serbian national imaginary
This article deals with the imagery of ‘the West’ in contemporary Serbia. In an analysis of interviews with young Serbian intellectuals, it evaluates how they use the metaphor of the West to construct their self-image. Furthermore, it discusses how Serbian responses to European stereotyping and ‘Othering’ of the Balkans can function as a form of celebratory appropriation, acceptance and exploitation of these stereotypes. It explores the ‘self-exo…
The Machine that Creates Slovenians’
This article illustrates how Slovenian national public television came to serve as a central site of contention where fundamental issues of identity, politics and national culture were challenged, negotiated and defined. The Slovenian case offers an interesting laboratory for an analysis of the role of journalism in creating and asserting a particular version of national identity. This article explores how Slovenian television's elites (journalis…
Branding Post-War Sarajevo
After the violent wars of the 1990s, Bosnia and Herzegovina is heavily promoting its tourism industry with the capital city of Sarajevo as the prime destination. Sarajevo became a city of death during 1992–1995, and its siege remains etched in local and global memories as a time of bombing, horrific shelling of locals, and brutal destruction of the city's cultural heritage. Today Sarajevo faces many dilemmas, including how to remember the 1990s t…
Smart” Cameras and the Operational Enclosure
Concerns about the impending implementation of facial recognition technology in public and shared spaces go beyond privacy to include the changing relationship between space and power. This article explores the relationship between automated identification and social sorting, decision-making, and response. To develop a theoretical framework for considering the ways in which facial recognition technology reconfigures power relations, the article c…
The Paradox of Ceca and the Turbo-Folk Audience
After the Yugoslav wars and the fall of Milosevic regime in 2000, Ceca, despite her ties to Serbian nationalism, became one of the most popular Balkan turbo-folk singers. While analyzing Ceca, the authors try to account for this paradoxical popularity while contributing to an understanding of the relationship between popular culture and politics in the former Yugoslavia. On the basis of in-depth interviews with young female students in the two mo…
Transnational celebrity activism in Bosnia and Herzegovina
This article focuses on the local understandings, responses and interpretations of celebrity activist Angelina Jolie and the film she directed in 2011 about the war rapes in Bosnia and Herzegovina: In the land of Blood and Honey. We first provide a brief historical context of the production and promotion of the film. Next, we offer a theoretical approach to the phenomenon of celebrity activism. In the third part, we look at how Jolie’s film has b…
Mapping the Notion of “Terrorism” in Serbian and Croatian Newspapers
The September 11 terrorist attacks in the United States have reconfigured the global public debates as of how to defend a “civilized” world from the “Islamic terrorism.” The U.S.-led war on terror against extremist groups also produced and triggered a particular discourse in the former Yugoslav countries. The main aim of this article is to present an example of a study that explores how media appropriate dominant global antiterrorism discourse an…
Connecting the Disconnected
This article looks at the emergence and potentials of a Balkan cultural studies. I argue that the productivity of a Balkan cultural studies lies in its willingness to engage with popular culture as a very real political force in the revolutionary transformations from the 1980s on. Some recent cultural developments are presented here to show how the mix of culture and cultural studies contributes to the political relevance and academic vibrancy of…
Commercial and sexualized nationalism on Serbian reality TV
This article explores the way in which the portrayal of gender becomes linked to that of ethno-nationalism on the popular Serbian reality show The Palace. On the basis of a textual analysis of the public reactions to the reality show and its interpretations by the local audiences in Slovenia and Serbia, we claim that the show promotes specifically gendered and sexualized ethno-national identities, and that the interpretation of the show continues…
Target’, ‘cancer’ and ‘warrior’
Children born of war rapes continue to be a marginalized political, media and academic topic in Bosnian and other post-war societies. The goal of this article is to contribute to the research that deals with the life situations of children born of war rape, and to show the usefulness of an analysis of metaphors when a specific topic is emotionally difficult to talk about. The metaphor analysis of life stories of 19 adolescents — all Bosniak girls…
The Kosovo Battle
In 2006, the international community started to finalize the political status of Kosovo, the Serbian province, inhabited mostly by the Muslim Albanian majority. At the end of October 2006, a referendum was held in Serbia, where a new constitution was passed that claims Kosovo as an integral part of Serbia. What has taken place in the so-called “last media battle for Kosovo”? This article investigates discourses of the two most popular Serbian new…
Scenes From the Last Yugoslav Generation
This article explores various aspects of how young Slovenian and Macedonian intellectuals, belonging to the last Yugoslav generation, articulate their (new) spaces of belonging and identity. I look at their Yugoslav memories and address a relatively straightforward question: how was the former Yugoslav community imagined, interpreted, represented, rejected, accepted and in what ways has this image of community been reappropriated and reimagined b…
Watching Pink Reality TV
In the post-socialist, post-war, neo-liberal, commercial media landscape in the former Yugoslavia, ethno-national, heterosexual femininity continues to be a dominant frame of reference. This article explores how the portrayal of gender is closely connected to ethno-nationalism on one of the most popular reality TV shows, The Palace, produced by the Serbian commercial broadcaster Pink TV. We analyse how female audiences in Bosnia and Herzegovina r…
Automated Parasociality
Recent developments in AI promise to further enact the shift from personalization to personification in automated digital interfaces. We have already seen the rise of virtual influencers and, more recently, of chatbots that adopt the personas of celebrities. Drawing on the intertwined history of the relationship between parasociality and personal influence, we frame the shift toward personification as a strategy for re-centralizing control over t…
I Want to Leave Slovenia for a Sunny, Relaxed and Open Australia
This article deals with the imagery of 'Australia' in contemporary Slovenia. In an analysis of both Slovene media texts and interviews with 32 Slovenes who want to immigrate to Australia, we explore a constructed image of Australia. We closely consider the symbolic imagery that shapes our informants' discourses about Australia in order to focus on sociocultural elements of migration, where the imagination plays a key role. We suggest that a close…
Hybridisation of Slovene Public Broadcasting
Public broadcasting institutions have existed as central and publicly funded national institutions, providing services in the public interest. The coincidence of technological, political and economic circumstances in the last 20 years or so, however, has challenged their monopoly position. Technological developments - specifically digitalisation - have expanded spectrum availability. In some cases, public television has been commercialised, priva…
Rehabilitating Milošević
This article analyses the media's coverage of Slobodan Milošević's death with an aim to uncover how media further use and incorporate social events into nationalistic discourses and, in that, reconstruct the myth of a legendary leader. The critical discoursive analysis shows that one of the most popular Serbian newspapers Večernje novosti recontextualized Milošević's death in accordance with the nationalistic media discourse that dominated his re…
Blaming the Media
The break-up of former (socialist) Yugoslavia is usually associated with the series of wars that started in 1991. Many scholars also recognize that the collapse of the state had been preceded by al
Place and resistance
This article, based on ethnographic research in Serbia, analyzes the topics of identity, memory and urban resistance in Serbia through an analysis of forty interviews with young Serbian intellectuals aged 23 to 35. I focus on the themes that recur in my informants' discourses on (national) spaces of belonging of the 1990s. My concern here is with making links between questions of memory, identity, belonging, resistance and space
Belgrade vs. Serbia
This article explores the relationship between the nation, the city, narratives, and belonging in Serbia through an analysis of narratives of a set of 30 interviews with young Belgrade intellectuals aged 23–35. I argue that what appears to be emerging in post-Milosevic Serbia is a new articulation and a new scale of belonging. Most of my informants are mobilising their city identities, moving from a national to an urban perspective. They imaginat…
The Machine that Creates Slovenians’
This article illustrates how Slovenian national public television came to serve as a central site of contention where fundamental issues of identity, politics and national culture were challenged, negotiated and defined. The Slovenian case offers an interesting laboratory for an analysis of the role of journalism in creating and asserting a particular version of national identity. This article explores how Slovenian television's elites (journalis…
The notion of ‘the West’ in the Serbian national imaginary
This article deals with the imagery of ‘the West’ in contemporary Serbia. In an analysis of interviews with young Serbian intellectuals, it evaluates how they use the metaphor of the West to construct their self-image. Furthermore, it discusses how Serbian responses to European stereotyping and ‘Othering’ of the Balkans can function as a form of celebratory appropriation, acceptance and exploitation of these stereotypes. It explores the ‘self-exo…
Blaming the Media
The break-up of former (socialist) Yugoslavia is usually associated with the series of wars that started in 1991. Many scholars also recognize that the collapse of the state had been preceded by al
Mapping the Notion of “Terrorism” in Serbian and Croatian Newspapers
The September 11 terrorist attacks in the United States have reconfigured the global public debates as of how to defend a “civilized” world from the “Islamic terrorism.” The U.S.-led war on terror against extremist groups also produced and triggered a particular discourse in the former Yugoslav countries. The main aim of this article is to present an example of a study that explores how media appropriate dominant global antiterrorism discourse an…
The Kosovo Battle
In 2006, the international community started to finalize the political status of Kosovo, the Serbian province, inhabited mostly by the Muslim Albanian majority. At the end of October 2006, a referendum was held in Serbia, where a new constitution was passed that claims Kosovo as an integral part of Serbia. What has taken place in the so-called “last media battle for Kosovo”? This article investigates discourses of the two most popular Serbian new…
War on terrorism’ as a discursive battleground
In different parts of the world the 9/11 terrorist attacks have been localized and negotiated by mainstream media and in other public discourses in rather diverse ways. This article explores how young Serbian intellectuals recontextualized G.W. Bush's ‘war on terrorism’ discourse in order to legitimize, retroactively, Serbian violence against Muslims in Bosnia and Kosovo during the 1990s. We go beyond Bernstein's concept of recontextualization, d…
Scenes From the Last Yugoslav Generation
This article explores various aspects of how young Slovenian and Macedonian intellectuals, belonging to the last Yugoslav generation, articulate their (new) spaces of belonging and identity. I look at their Yugoslav memories and address a relatively straightforward question: how was the former Yugoslav community imagined, interpreted, represented, rejected, accepted and in what ways has this image of community been reappropriated and reimagined b…
Technological Developments in Central-Eastern Europe
Based on in-depth interviews and a political economy analysis, this paper offers an evaluation of a Computer Literacy Project in Slovenia that was created as a part of a larger technological development project in the region. The article is divided into three main parts. The first part offers some critical arguments on the notions of development and technology. The second part contains an analysis of why the Computer Literacy Project received muc…
We Defend Western Civilization’
This article explores how young Serbian intellectuals interpret and further recontextualize the global reactions to the publication of the cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. On the basis of in-depth interviews and critical discourse analysis, we show how the Serbian mainstream discourses frame the ‘cartoon crisis’ in a specific way—Muslims are labeled as ‘fundamentalists’ and ‘terrorists’. The article argues that this provides a historical excuse …
Former Yugoslavia On the World Wide Web
Since the violent collapse of former Yugoslavia, the `new' nation-states of Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Kosovo, Montenegro and Macedonia have attempted to position themselves on the global map while seeking to create a distinctive `brand' (national) identity. Drawing on a textual analysis of their official governmental websites, this article explores how these former Yugoslav states use the Internet to create and represent …
That’s Me
In this article, we consider the themes and reception of To Sam Ja ( That’s Me) , a Big Brother–style Balkan reality TV show filmed in Macedonia in 2004 and 2005 that featured several cast members from former Yugoslav republics living together. Drawing on examples taken from the production and reception of To Sam Ja, we explore the way in which the show manages political and economic conflicts by transposing them into the realm of the personal
A Slovene president's self-help discourse
In this article we examine the self-help discourses in Slovene President Drnovsek's blog, which he uses as the main tool to communicate with the Slovene public. On the basis of a critical discourse analysis of Drnovsek's writings, we argue that Drnovsek recontextualises Slovene political discourse and replaces it with a particular type of therapeutic discourse. We explore Drnovsek's self-help discourse as a way of approaching some issues associat…
Rehabilitating Milošević
This article analyses the media's coverage of Slobodan Milošević's death with an aim to uncover how media further use and incorporate social events into nationalistic discourses and, in that, reconstruct the myth of a legendary leader. The critical discoursive analysis shows that one of the most popular Serbian newspapers Večernje novosti recontextualized Milošević's death in accordance with the nationalistic media discourse that dominated his re…
Information Literacy
Today, some of the most prominent policies in schools throughout the (post)industrialized world, and especially in developing Central and Eastern European countries, relate to the rapid introduction of information and communication technologies (ICTs). The concept of “information literacy” is the most common rationale for introducing educational ICTs. This concept is so poorly defined that it may best be investigated as a form of ideology. The ar…
Target’, ‘cancer’ and ‘warrior’
Children born of war rapes continue to be a marginalized political, media and academic topic in Bosnian and other post-war societies. The goal of this article is to contribute to the research that deals with the life situations of children born of war rape, and to show the usefulness of an analysis of metaphors when a specific topic is emotionally difficult to talk about. The metaphor analysis of life stories of 19 adolescents — all Bosniak girls…
Living With the Sins of Their Fathers
Children born of war rape continue to be a taboo theme in many post-war societies, also in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BH). This study is based on in-depth interviews with eleven adolescents born of war rape in BH. The main goal is to present how these adolescents represent themselves and their life-situations. On the basis of the research we identify four key themes: 1) their continued sense of hostility even after the end of the war; 2) the interna…
The Paradox of Ceca and the Turbo-Folk Audience
After the Yugoslav wars and the fall of Milosevic regime in 2000, Ceca, despite her ties to Serbian nationalism, became one of the most popular Balkan turbo-folk singers. While analyzing Ceca, the authors try to account for this paradoxical popularity while contributing to an understanding of the relationship between popular culture and politics in the former Yugoslavia. On the basis of in-depth interviews with young female students in the two mo…
Fame on the Farm
Introduction In autumn 2009, the Slovene commercial broadcaster POP TV built on the success of its popular reality format The Farm (Kmetija) by creating a celebrity version of the show. Like its predecessor, Celebrity Farm tapped into a sense of national identity rooted in the values and community o
Commercial and sexualized nationalism on Serbian reality TV
This article explores the way in which the portrayal of gender becomes linked to that of ethno-nationalism on the popular Serbian reality show The Palace. On the basis of a textual analysis of the public reactions to the reality show and its interpretations by the local audiences in Slovenia and Serbia, we claim that the show promotes specifically gendered and sexualized ethno-national identities, and that the interpretation of the show continues…
Connecting the Disconnected
This article looks at the emergence and potentials of a Balkan cultural studies. I argue that the productivity of a Balkan cultural studies lies in its willingness to engage with popular culture as a very real political force in the revolutionary transformations from the 1980s on. Some recent cultural developments are presented here to show how the mix of culture and cultural studies contributes to the political relevance and academic vibrancy of…
Branding Post-War Sarajevo
After the violent wars of the 1990s, Bosnia and Herzegovina is heavily promoting its tourism industry with the capital city of Sarajevo as the prime destination. Sarajevo became a city of death during 1992–1995, and its siege remains etched in local and global memories as a time of bombing, horrific shelling of locals, and brutal destruction of the city's cultural heritage. Today Sarajevo faces many dilemmas, including how to remember the 1990s t…
I Want to Leave Slovenia for a Sunny, Relaxed and Open Australia
This article deals with the imagery of 'Australia' in contemporary Slovenia. In an analysis of both Slovene media texts and interviews with 32 Slovenes who want to immigrate to Australia, we explore a constructed image of Australia. We closely consider the symbolic imagery that shapes our informants' discourses about Australia in order to focus on sociocultural elements of migration, where the imagination plays a key role. We suggest that a close…
Hybridisation of Slovene Public Broadcasting
Public broadcasting institutions have existed as central and publicly funded national institutions, providing services in the public interest. The coincidence of technological, political and economic circumstances in the last 20 years or so, however, has challenged their monopoly position. Technological developments - specifically digitalisation - have expanded spectrum availability. In some cases, public television has been commercialised, priva…
Sociology (33 works) · Political science (31 works) · Law (26 works) · Politics (22 works) · Media studies (20 works) · Balkans: History, Politics, Society (18 works) · Law (18 works) · Art (15 works) · Aesthetics (13 works) · Gender Studies (13 works)