New Publication: "Südosteuropa" Special Issue on Urban Ethnography
Issue edited by Professor Ger Duijzings includes article by Postdoc Čarna Brković
16.04.2018
The new issue of "Südosteuropa: Journal of Politics and Society" presents a special section with articles on urban ethnography, which has been guest edited by Prof. Dr. Ger Duijzings, Principal Investigator of the Graduate School for East and Southeast European Studies. Amongst the articles is the paper "The Everyday Life of a Homo Sacer. Enclave Urbanism in Podgorica, Montenegro" by Čarna Brković, Postdoc of the Graduate School.
Volume 66 (2018), Is. 1, of "Südosteuropa" includes the first series of articles on "urban ethnography," exploring everyday life in cities and towns across Southeastern Europe. The aim is, as guest editor Ger Duijzings states, to provide a plattform for anthropologists and practioners of other Urban Studies disciplines who may be using qualitiative methods to approach cities from a phenomenological perspective, from the point of view of the people inhabiting urban (infra)structures and spaces.
Brković's article ethnographically follows the everyday life of a homo sacer — a young Roma woman who has lived her whole life in a camp for displaced persons. The camp has been built for Roma, Ashkalias, and Balkan Egyptians who in 1999 fled from the violence in Kosovo to Podgorica, the capital of Montenegro. The key aim of the article is to see what happens with the concepts of ‘homo sacer’ and ‘bare life’ when ethnographically engaged in the context of Southeastern Europe. The article argues that ethnographic fieldwork in urban settings reveals in what way a homo sacer has an everyday life and a complex sociopolitical existence, and that camps are urban formations that can be related to very different sociohistorical and political projects.
Further Reading
Südosteuropa: Journal of Politics and Society 66 (1: Urban Ethnography), 2018.
Ger Duijzings: Urban Ethnography. An Introduction. In: Südosteuropa: Journal of Politics and Society 66 (1), 2018, 1-9. DOI:10.1515/soeu-2018-0001.
Čarna Brković: The Everyday Life of a Homo Sacer. Enclave Urbanism in Podgorica, Montenegro. In: Südosteuropa: Journal of Politics and Society 66 (1), 2018, 10–26. DOI:10.1515/soeu-2018-0002.