Special Conversations in Conflict Studies presents: Azra Hromadzic

"Streets, Scum, and People: Discourses of Civility in Postwar Bihac, Bosnia-Herzegovina."  Azra Hromadzic, Assistant Professor, Anthropology at the Syracuse University Maxwell School.   
Description: Building on ten years of ethnographic research in postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina, in this presentation Dr. Hromadzic documents how the war and postwar contexts are generative of  prolific discourses and practices of ‘civility’. Hromadzic understands civility as people’s strategic maneuvering of the extremely ethnicized—thus tender and intimate—postwar social field.  She is especially interested in ordinary people’s tactical employment of one particular register of civility. She argues that ordinary Bosnians-Herzegovinians employ discourses of “a cultured person” to establish innocence, to claim moral purity, to seek recognition, and to protect their own and others’ dignity in everyday cross-ethnic encounters.  In the process, people frequently establish urban as cultured and peaceful, and rural as uncultured and nationalist, and they dislocate the responsibility for the war, violence and postwar decay from the civilized people. Hromadzic analyzes how these discourses of civility around culture represent a careful navigation of the fragile postwar context.  She will further assert that they serve as a critique of the contemporary disorder in the country, and they offer a narrow space for trans-ethnic solidarity, however tentative, exclusionary and provisional.
Pizza will be served. Follow us on Twitter at: PARCCatMaxwell, tweet #ConvoInConflict.