Melina Sadiković
Ph.D candidate, Faculty of Arts, Humanities, University of Brighton, UK
- Examples of concrete activities I have organized/am organizing in the field of “dealing with the past”:
- Team member of the SCOPES project: Memory, History and State Building in Bosnia and Herzegovina: Critically Assessing and Re-Thinking the Teaching of Memory in Bosnian University Curricula (September 2011-September 2014); Member of the organizing committee of the International Conference “Perspectives in (post)conflict academia and society: Opening spaces for critically assessing and rethinking history and memory”, Sarajevo, March, 2013
- The Who re-member(s)? project – a Regional Forum on Transitional Justice represents a joint project of ACIPS in BiH, Documenta in Croatia and Center for Cultural decontamination in Serbia (2011) ; coordinator of the research study and editor of the book Re:vizija prošlosti. Politike sjećanja u Bosni i Hercegovini, Hrvatskoj i Srbiji od 1990. godine, Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, Sarajevo, BiH, 2012
- Work on the gathering of personal stories from Bosnia and Herzegovina, associate at the Documentation Center “Wars 1991-1999”, within the People at War project (2003 -2005)
- Concrete challenges I am facing in my “dealing with the past”-related work:
There are many challenges in the process of dealing with the past itself and in related work. Here, I will use the description provided by Noel Malcolm in his study on the history of Bosnia and Herzegovina, where the problem (and challenges) are well elaborated. He states that: ‘[T]he war which engulfed this country in 1992 has added two melancholy reasons for examining its history more closely: the first is the need to understand the origins of fighting, and the second is the need to dispel some of the clouds of misunderstanding, deliberate myth-making and sheer ignorance in which all discussion of Bosnia and its history has become shrouded.’ One of the main challenge in my research work is contribution to the understanding of the war experience as well as the ways it affects and shapes the processes of reconstruction of the lives and community/ies after the conflict.
- My personal link to/interest for the topic of “dealing with difficult pasts”:
- My war experience in Sarajevo, under the siege
- Significant experience of life in post-conflict society of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the work on the projects focused on conflict resolution, peacebuilding, reconciliation (dealing with the past)
- Absolute love and true respect for all ‘good people in the time of evil’ whose ‘small deeds’ present a precious basis for resistance to ‘the masters of time’.
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