Prof. Dr Stef Jansen: Challenges of Temporal Coordination in the European Semiperiphery [EN]
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Research Factory B/ORDERS IN MOTION
10 June, 16:15 - 17:45
Room: GD 102 & in the livestream
Prof. Dr Stef Jansen: Challenges of Temporal Coordination in the European Semiperiphery [EN]
This presentation takes as its starting point that the diversity of people's dealing with, and understanding of time must be understood in light of their positions within an unequal global political-economic configuration. Leaving aside presumably cultural differences, it explores how the mere fact of living in a particular place at a particular historical conjuncture may foster particular engagements with time. Working through examples from ethnographic research in contemporary Bosnia and Herzegovina, I will argue that life in this semiperipheral European configuration - in this here and now - tends to confront people with specific contradictions in this respect. This often involves a mismatch between the temporal structures and logics associated with different scales, which requires navigational efforts of coordination that may alleviate but do not resolve these contradictions.
Social anthropologist Stef Jansen is professor at the University of Sarajevo (Bosnia and Herzegovina) and honorary professor at the University of Manchester (UK). His ethnographic studies in the post-Yugoslav states have focused, among other things, on questions of home, hope, the state, borders, political subjectivity, social transformations and everyday geopolitics.
For more information, see https://stefjansenweb.wordpress.com/
Keynote lecture of the workshop "Uneven Temporalities in Kosovo and Beyond: Waiting, Moving, and Future-Making at Europe's "Semi-Periphery", June 10 and 11, 2026, at European University Viadrina, organised by the Viadrina Center B/ORDERS IN MOTION in collaboration with the Südosteuropa-Gesellschaft.
