Professor Jasmina Husanović Pehar
IASH-SSPS Fellow, February 2025 - June 2025
Home Institution: University of Tuzla
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.
Project Title: Commoning the Infrastructure of Social Change: Ecologies of Care and Political Agency in Bosnia and Herzegovina
My research examines how political agency develops over time in conflict-affected societies through particular political practices that address systemic violence, multiple injustices, and vulnerabilities at the intersection between care, democracy and environment. It is driven by the question of how social movements and civil society groups fight for and forge public languages of grief and hope, and engage in the politics of social justice. The categories of time, energy and infrastructure are central to this exploration of the ecologies of care and politics of commons in a particular locale, as three problematics essential to understanding various strategies and possibilities of social change.
In terms of my fieldwork, I draw on the participatory action research in the field of social activism, cultural production and knowledge production which I conducted in the last decades in Bosnia and Herzegovina, whilst also using critical pedagogies, collaborative ethnography and autoethnography in order to produce key strategies for knowledge-led transformative social practices. In this respect it draws transnational parallels and divergences to other post-conflict areas, as well as on recent insights of materialist political ecology, theories of social reproduction, decolonial critical theory, and critical pedagogies in the field of environmental democracy and critical social literacy.