An IASH work-in-progress seminar, delivered by Professor Jasmina Husanović Pehar (IASH-SSPS Fellow, 2025)
Time – Energy – Infrastructure: Navigating Trauma, Revolt and Care in Emancipatory Politics
My work-in-progress presentation is an excursion into the challenge of commoning the social good/property and enacting political communality within the social and political movements in Bosnia and Herzegovina over the past decades. I will situate my research and activism within broader historical conjunctures, then draw connections between my past and current work, and outline future plans for critical thinking on emancipatory politics through the triad of time, energy, and infrastructure—bringing in new materials and discussions developed during my current fellowship at IASH.
I want to open space to think through emancipatory interventions shaped by traumatic knowledge in a post-atrocity, post-conflict, and post-socialist landscape. Rooted in grassroots activism, knowledge production, and cultural production in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Yugoslav successor states, this knowledge weaves together lessons from a politics of witnessing to trauma and poverty, a politics of revolt against being treated as “human waste,” and a politics of care that builds communality during and after catastrophe.
Following this triple thread—trauma, revolt, and care—means engaging with the sediments, seeds, and sprouts of feminist peacebuilding, anti-nationalist memory politics, labour protests, and environmental activism. These movements have undergone many developments, successes and failures in the last few decades, all the while consistently demanding a radical rethinking of governance and a regeneration of the social fabric through mass-based, innovative political methods. How have they acted against the logic of privatisation, extraction, and alienation that permeates time, energy, and infrastructure necessary for political practice for social good?
My focus is on ways of imagining, learning, and doing related to the following imperatives:
a) to intervene in temporal stasis/paralysis in order to produce time political—to socialise and collectivise time;
b) to counter metabolic entropy and the extraction of energy and the capacity to act and think politically in relation to the question of social metabolism and political subjectivity/agency;
c) to resist the anti-social dissolution of infrastructures through the incessant work of the under-commons.
Please join in-person, or click the link below to join the webinar:
https://ed-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/83015772676
Passcode: b1QpaAD7