This interdisciplinary project understands forms of violence inherent to mining as historically constitutive of mining as a profession that generates forms of collective life and memory, as well as significantly shaping labor, family, gender, and social relations. Combining ethnographic methods, archival work, and cultural texts analysis, the project examines processes and events from the long 20th century that have shaped the reality of mining communities in several localities in the former Yugoslavia: miners’ accidents, disasters; the detrimental effects of mining on the environment, bodies, and minds; and miners’ strikes. This diverse material reveals how the violence inherent to mining governs social, moral, and affective economies, how it is encoded into social, cultural, artistic, and media narratives about mining, and how it shapes the political subjectivities and collectivities of miners and their political struggles. The project offers new perspectives on the relationship between violence and mining, and points to complex ways in which memory and violence relate to one other, revealing mining as a social realm where »fast« and slow violence are deeply entangled.

Tanja Petrović is head of the Institute of Culture and Memory Studies, Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts (ZRC SAZU). She is interested in the afterlives of socialist Yugoslavia and the ways in which they shape the reality of post-Yugoslav societies. She is a honorary research associate of the Graduiertenschule für Ost- und Südosteuropastudien in Regensburg and was a fellow of the Centre for Advanced Studies in Sofia, the Netherlands Centre for Advanced Studies, and Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. She is the author and editor of several books and a number of articles and essays in the fields of anthropology of post-socialism, memory studies, gender history, linguistic anthropology, and labour history. Her most recent book is Utopia of the Uniform: Affective Afterlives of the Yugoslav People’s Army (Duke University Press 2024).