Organized by the Association française d’études sur les Balkans (AFEBalk, https://afebalk.hypotheses.org/), the fifth Balkan studies meeting will be held at the Mucem in Marseilles from September 25 to 27, 2025. An important event in the life of AFEBalk, the REB enable researchers and doctoral students to present their current research and recent publications. They also provide an opportunity for the association to present its activities, recruit new members and hold its annual general meeting. Following on from previous meetings, the 2025 event aims to bring together the driving forces behind research in and on the Balkans around a cross-cutting theme. This year’s theme, Balkan matters! Material cultures in the Balkans, will aim to give an overview of research on material cultures in and about the Balkans, and thus stimulate new research.
This theme will strengthen the link between AFEBalk and Mucem, after eight years of fruitful collaboration. In choosing to focus on objects and material culture, the aim is also to bring together social science researchers and the museum institution, crossing their complementary missions. With this in mind, we are proposing a range of activities to bring researchers and the museum into contact with each other, before, during and after the event. From this point of view, we also affirm AFEBalk’s interest in associating various institutional partners in the fields of knowledge dissemination and scientific culture, on a national and international scale, to research on the Balkans.
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While the material turn has been well known in the social sciences for at least twenty years, the vitality of these approaches varies according to cultural areas and disciplines. From the study of technical systems to the exploration of the social life of things and the transformation of environments, different theoretical currents seek to understand what connects us to material things (raw materials, artifacts, instruments, infrastructures, living entities, etc.). These fields of thought lead us to consider objects not as inert things, but as agents with an influence on individuals, societies and environments. They also question distinctions that are often problematic, such as material/immaterial, real/virtual, concrete/abstract. Indeed, alongside the dematerialization brought about by digitalization, our worlds are being populated by new materialities that call for just as many uses and ways of doing things, forms of appropriation, exchange and circulation.
We propose to approach the notion of materiality(ies) from a Balkan perspective, with the aim of understanding how it enables us to take a new look at Balkan societies, both in their long history and in their contemporary configurations. We will seek to understand how materialities in their various senses (objects and materials, production and transformation processes, uses and circulation, representations and imaginaries, etc.) offer original potential for observing and understanding the social facts, cultural representations and political issues that run through these societies. We will be focusing on approaches from different disciplinary fields (human and social sciences, artistic disciplines, but also museology, natural sciences, etc.) in order to illustrate the theoretical and methodological contributions of the notion of materiality(ies) to open up new fields of knowledge about the Balkans. Finally, we aim at understanding how, from the perspective of the Balkans, can emerge crossed and transversal reflections on the notion of materiality itself.
Member of the organising committee; liaison with the Mucem museum and programme coordination for a research event dedicated to Balkan material cultures.
Presentation « Déplacer l’oubli : les dépôtgraphies de Jusuf Hadzifejzovic »
Public presentation of research workshop « Objet of an Encounter » with Gruia Badescu, Raphaël Bories, Oriane Girard, Juliette Ronsin and Béatrice von Hirschausen