Records and their imaginaries: imagining the impossible, making possible the imagined

© 2015 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht This paper argues that the roles of individual and collective imaginings about the absent or unattainable archive and its contents should be explicitly acknowledged in both archival theory and practice. We propose two new terms: impossible archival imaginaries and imagined records. These concepts offer important affective counterbalances and sometimes resistance to dominant legal, bureaucratic, historical and forensic notions of evidence that so often fall short in explaining the capacity of records and archives to motivate, inspire, anger and traumatize. The paper begins with a reflection on how imagined records have surfaced in our own work related to human rights. It then reviews some of the ways in which the concept of the imaginary has been understood by scholarship in other fields. It considers how such interpretations might contribute epistemologically to the phenomenon of impossible archival imaginaries; and it provides examples of what we argue are impossible archival imaginaries at work. The paper moves on to examine specific cases and “archival stories” involving imagined records and contemplate how they can function societally in ways similar to actual records because of the weight of their absence or because of their aspirational nature. Drawing upon threads that run through these cases, we propose definitions of both phenomena that not only augment the current descriptive, analytical and explicatory armaments of archival theory and practice but also open up the possibility of “returning” them (Ketelaar in Research in the archival multiverse. Monash University Press, Melbourne 2015a) as theoretical contributions to the fields from which the cases were drawn

Moving past: probing the agency and affect of recordkeeping in individual and community lives in post-conflict Croatia

Reporting on ongoing research, this paper reviews stories, drawn from recent literature as well as gathered through ethnographic research, that people tell about records and recordkeeping during and since the Yugoslav Wars. It focuses on what these stories reveal of the agency and affect of recordkeeping in individual and community lives, particularly in Croatia. The paper concludes with a contemplation of what might be learned from such an approach for the development of recordkeeping infrastructures that can anticipate, avert or alleviate some of the ways in which records and recordkeeping continue to traumatize or target the vulnerable, and frustrate and prevent the human and societal need to "move forward," if not "move past." © 2014 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht

Refugee artists and memories of displacement: a visual semiotics analysis

This paper considers the ways in which refugee artists represent the experience of displacement, their cultural traditions and the longing for home through paintings and how, by doing so, they become the visual interpreters of the current refugee crisis. The starting point of this article is that little attention has been paid towards the visual narratives of artworks produced by refugee artists and shared on social media. Through the visual semiotics analysis of 150 images of paintings (exhibited on the Facebook page Syria.Art) and through a number of individual interviews with the artists themselves, the article identifies three emerging visual narratives. These are concerned primarily with reminiscences about people, places and cultural practices lost (or in danger of being lost) because of the forced journey and because of the displacement. Within this context, these visual discourses become part of an open repository, which mediates, re-organises and preserves memories, both personal and collective as a form of emotional survival and resilience. It is argued that these visual narratives and representations nurture empathy for the human condition of the refugees and universalise the migrant experience

Bosnian Austrians: Accidental migrants in trans-local and cyber spaces

This article explores the on-site and online realities of Bosnian immigrants in Austria whose migration, at least initially, started as a forced displacement. It describes how their social networks-performed and sustained both in real and cyber space-are utilized in strengthening social cohesion and trans-local identities in relation to places in Austria and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Ultimately, the article attempts to challenge the established methodological and theoretical orthodoxies in migration studies and to deconstruct the myth about refugees as a 'societal burden' subject to charity, arguing that any strict division between different migration categories and paradigms will miss addressing the multiplicity of ever-changing relationships, meanings and opportunities especially as they are (re)imagined in the realm of cyberspace

Reclaiming erased lives: archives, records and memories in post-war Bosnia and the Bosnian diaspora

In this paper, based on conventional and digital ethnography, I first identify three dominant research areas relating to the issues of destruction, use and abuse of archives and records in post-war Bosnia, and discuss their legal, political and ethical dimensions. I then go on to present two ethnographies describing how survivors of 'ethnic cleansing' and genocide in Bosnia and in the Bosnian refugee diaspora perceive, experience and deal with missing personal records and material evidence of their histories, as well as how they (re)create their own archives and memories, and in the process reassert their 'erased' identities in both real and cyber space. This paper also describes how contemporary technologies-including biomedical technology and information and communication technology-impact the reconstruction of individual and collective identities in shattered Bosnian families and communities in the aftermath of genocide. The ethnographies described point to the novel contribution that these technologies have made to re-humanising both those who perished and the survivors of the war in Bosnia

In Press - Long-distance mourning and synchronised memories in a global context: commemorating srebrenica in diaspora

This paper discusses annual commemorative activities of July 11 in the Bosnian diaspora communities in Europe, the USA and Australia, a widely embraced grassroots trend commemorating the 1995 Srebrenica genocide that has become an important act of public memorialisation, reassertion of collective identity and a form of political activism among the Bosnian refugees and genocide survivors in different places across the globe where they have settled. In addition to serving as a cohesive factor among the members of the Bosnian diaspora communities and providing them with a social context in which they can collectively mourn their losses, the Srebrenica commemorations in diaspora have been increasingly reaching out to include members and leaders of the mainstream communities; hence becoming distinct, locally situated, global public events about Bosnia and Srebrenica rather than remaining the exclusive Bosnian immigrants' gatherings that they initially tended to be. In conjunction with the public commemorations, Bosnian diaspora organisations and initiatives have successfully lobbied the governments of their adopted countries to pass resolutions recognising the Srebrenica genocide and calling for July 11 to be acknowledged as the Srebrenica Remembrance Day

Research and conceptualization of forced migrations in the Western Balkans

Abstract not availabl

Trans-local communities in the age of transnationalism: Bosnians in diaspora

Today, Bosnians represent one of the newly emerging and the most widely dispersed diasporic communities from the Balkans. There are large communities of Bosnians living in almost every European country, as well as throughout North America and Australia. Most were displaced during the 1992-1995 Bosnian war, in which 2.2 million people were forced to leave their homes, 1.6 million of whom looked for refuge abroad. In contrast with, and in response to, the enforced displacement, many members of the Bosnian diaspora have retained strong family and other ''informal'' social ties with both Bosnians in other countries and those still living in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH, or Bosnia). Such ties - focused on preservation of cultural memory and performance of distinct local identities - form the basis of the global network of the Bosnian diaspora and its link with the original home (land). In this paper, I briefly outline the links and networks that constitute diaspora, and then go on to explore the extent to which recent scholarly literature is able to ''capture'' the uniqueness and complexity of the Bosnian diasporic communities in Australia, the United States (U.S.) and Europe. Finally, I attempt to define the concept of ''trans-localism'' and how it is (per)formed, and suggest that the predominantly ''transnational'' conceptual framework within the migration studies needs to be expanded to include ''trans-local'' diasporic identity formation among displaced Bosnians and similar diaspora groups

Pedagogies of place and peace: Experiential and reflexive learning in post-conflict context

Rather than regarding the learning contexts as mere physical or virtual structures in which learning takes place, this paper promotes the idea of learning contexts as being inseparable from content itself-as how and where we learn very much influences what and why we learn. By purposely making our students to be aware of the contexts where learning activities are conducted and encouraging them to explore and challenge the entrenched dichotomies of different spaces and places-such as public vs. private, formal vs. informal, domestic vs. foreign, outdoor vs. indoor and online vs. on-site-as educators, we can refocus to and maximise the benefits of the social, experiential and emotional dimensions of learning and teaching. Such approach might even challenge the traditional understandings of knowledge production, seen as taking place in isolation within the walls of universities or labs and then subsequently transferred to community and industry. The paper discusses the ways knowledge production and transfer can also work other way around, how academia/universities could-and should-learn from community, i.e. in a real and lived social environment. It also aims to emphasise, and practically demonstrate, that we do not teach 'value neutral' skills, that ethics remain at the core of every pedagogical approach and should underpin every discipline, expert knowledge and skill. The paper draws on a decade of leading international student groups through the experiences of visiting post-genocide regions in eastern Bosnia. Through learning from local people and their environments, students could glean a sense of the intensity of local relationships to place and rethink how these 'remote' locales can act as an alter axis mundi in students' lives and relationships to dominant metropolitan knowledges. In exchange, local hosts have opportunities to educate and reorient students in such a way that their expert knowledges can be acknowledged and affirmed