What is happening when nothing is happening? And how can we study events that are ‘uneventful’? As a research field, memory studies has mostly focused on violent events (wars, conflicts and particularly the Holocaust) and their (public) remembrance. However, the proposed project (RESLOVI) attempts to move away from studying public remembrance of conflicts and proposes an innovative approach to viewing the aftermath of violent events. RESLOVI focuses on memories and experiences of displacement, caused by a war and a natural disaster. The project’s main research objective is to rethink memory of suffering and violence in a post-conflict and post-disaster setting by raising awareness of violence that is ‘unspectacular’, happening out of sight, and is not publicly remembered or even acknowledged as violence at all. RESLOVI counters the mainstream theories of memory studies by employing an innovative theory of ‘slow violence’. The project examines how people from a region in a post-conflict and post-disaster country grapple with and remember the experience of displacement, which is considered as a form of ‘slow violence’. The project entails 3 key objectives: (1) To contribute to innovative research on ‘slow violence’ by studying its characteristics in a region of post-war Croatia at the example of slow-moving transformations of the built environment that produced new vulnerabilities (displacements); (2) To introduce the ‘slow memory’ theoretical approach into studying how memories of Croatian population’s displacement are triggered and reframed in the context of new displacements happening due to new crisis situations; (3) To analyse the community response (‘mnemonic solidarity’) to suffering and to contribute to research on political significance of citizens’ mobilization and agency in a post-disaster setting and in a post-conflict context.

The SOC-ILL action introduces the first systematic comparative interdisciplinary investigation into women illustrators in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY, 1945–1991), paying attention to all former Yugoslav contexts and combining art and literary historical and theoretical approaches with cultural studies for novel critical insights into socialist aesthetic education and subjectivation of children, especially in relation to gender. Through the examination of multiple archives and interviews with older generations of professionals working within the feminized sector of publishing for minors, the action works against their disappearance before any academic documentation can take place. The action entails 3 main objectives: (i) To explore and contextually interpret distinctive childhood- and gender conceptions within Yugoslav publishing for minors; (ii) To map the practice of women illustrators for minors at the intersection between local, regional and international artistic and aesthetic education movements; (iii) To intervene into academic “archiving” by supporting a more complex understanding of socialist modernist aesthetic education and subjectivation. Thus the action contributes to redefinition of the relation between communicative and cultural memory of the European socialist past in the broader fields of Yugoslav, Slavonic, and socialist studies and the disciplines of art, literary and cultural history. These objectives can only be achieved in the proposed collaboration, with my cross-sectorally situated research – my expertise on (post)socialist women’s authorship, i.e. a pioneering thesis on gender, war, and memory and a variety of international scientific and art events – and the beneficiary’s distinctive expertise within the emerging (post)Yugoslav studies. This unique transfer will ensure a notable academic footprint, my full re-integration into science and foster impactful scientific cognizance within a broad range of stakeholders.

The global decline of arthropod populations threatens biodiversity, ecosystem services, and food webs, with pesticides as a major driver. Arthropods are crucial for pollination, decomposition, and as prey for vertebrates. This decline, linked to intensive agriculture, affects over 74% of the world’s agricultural land with pesticide contamination. Despite EU regulations, pesticide pollution impacts aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems. Current risk assessments focus on survival, overlooking sub-lethal effects that can disrupt physiology and behavior affecting fitness and population viability. This project investigates the sub-lethal effects of pesticide exposure on the fitness of riparian Tetragnatha spiders, which are key predators in riparian ecosystems. These spiders feed on aquatic insects and thereby transfer pesticides to terrestrial environments. Despite their ecological importance, the impact of pesticides on their reproduction remains poorly understood. I will evaluate how sub-lethal pesticide exposure affects fitness-related traits, including sperm quality, oocyte development, and reproductive behavior, addressing gaps in ecotoxicological assessments. I hypothesize that pesticide exposure will reduce sperm quantity and quality, cause DNA fragmentation, impair oocyte development, and disrupt mating behavior, leading to reduced fitness and population viability. The project combines laboratory and field experiments along the Mura River in Slovenia, an area with documented pesticide contamination. Field data will inform laboratory experiments where spiders are exposed to various pesticide concentrations through contaminated prey. We will assess reproductive parameters and behavioral changes to understand the broader implications of pesticide exposure. This interdisciplinary research will advance evolutionary ecotoxicology, enhance understanding of pesticide impacts on reproduction, and inform conservation strategies, aligning with EU environmental objectives.

Months into the Covid-19 pandemic, it is clear that global society is faced with an emergency of not only health, but of social mobilisation and communication, unfolding in paths we are only beginning to discern. Emerging research suggests that the pandemic is bringing a major reframing of notions of collectivity and national belonging, where a figurative, metaphorical political rhetoric is paving ways to sweeping ‘coronationalisms’, across Europe. Certainly timely and appropriate, the academic and citizen interest in language of the crisis points to public discourse metaphoricity as a new challenge for crisis research globally. By locating the analysis in the post-Yugoslav, post-socialist area, where persisting nationalist tensions mix with pandemic discourses in complex ways, this project lays the foundations for interdisciplinary, language-driven study of crisis discourse grounded in the role of metaphor for rooting perceptions of the past, present and future. The project thus addresses objectives on two levels: (1) exploring the (re)framings of collectivity, national belonging and nationalism in the post-Yugoslav political, media and citizen discourses, and (2) introducing a multi-dimensional metaphorical methodological approach to public discourse analysis, bringing together cognitive-linguistic metaphor study and social science study of politics, history and cultural memory, as an adaptable interdisciplinary model suited to approaching discourses of crisis and social transformation. The analyses, methodology and dedication to public debate together are expected to pave the way to rethinking effective crisis communication in this and other looming crises, by drawing on our pioneering insights on the conceptual role of language in mapping the real and symbolic borders and connections of (post-)pandemic Europe.