Mempop: Memory and Populism from Below

14/05/2026

Very exciting opportunity for the researchers of borders, with an incredible team! 👇

📢𝐂𝐚𝐥𝐥 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐏𝐚𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐬: 𝟑𝟑𝐫𝐝 𝐑𝐞𝐬𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐜𝐡𝐞𝐫𝐬 𝐨𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐁𝐨𝐫𝐝𝐞𝐫 𝐒𝐞𝐦𝐢𝐧𝐚𝐫 & 𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐤𝐬𝐡𝐨𝐩 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐒𝐩𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐥 𝐑𝐞𝐜𝐲𝐜𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐞𝐚𝐦
🟢We are pleased to invite you to the 33rd seminar of the Researchers on the Border (Badacze i Badaczki na granicy) group. This edition is organized in collaboration with our team and devoted to the theme of memory of borders and border-making. We are looking for contributions exploring how state or regional borders impact the daily lives of local and national communities.
🟢Date: June 12-13, 2026
🟢Format: Hybrid (Online & On-site in Gruszki near Narewka, Podlasie)
🟢Languages: Polish and English
🟢Submission Deadline: May 24, 2026
🔗Link to the registration form in the comments.

Instytut Slawistyki Polskiej Akademii Nauk
Karolina Ćwiek-Rogalska Karin VonReichenberg Michal Korhel Magdalena Bubík

05/05/2026

📣 Our associated researcher Astrea Nikolovska (Astrea Aki Pejoväki) has recently published a piece on depleted uranium in Serbia, a highly disputed war waste from the 1999 NATO bombing

🔗 https://www.eurozine.com/poison-and-promise/

When NATO intervened in the Yugoslav wars on 24 March 1999, depleted uranium weaponry punctured Serbian targets across the region, leaving permanent contamination behind. Populists, whose victim narrative gained ground, now position nuclear as the solution to energy dependency. But how can public fear and security be one and the same?

Poison and promise, Astrea Nikolovska via IWM - Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen

© Astrea Nikolovska / Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) / Eurozine

27/04/2026

📢 MEMPOP at the Presidential Visit to the Institute of Ethnology

On 1 April, the President of the Czech Republic, Petr Pavel, visited the Institute of Ethnology as part of his meetings with centers of excellence within the Czech Academy of Sciences.

We are proud that our postdoctoral researcher, Diána Vonnák, was part of the delegation welcoming the President and had the opportunity to present the key research areas of the project.

On 1 April Czech President Petr Pavel visited the Institute of Ethnology, as part of his visit meeting centres of excellence within the Czech Academy of Sciences. Diána Vonnák presented the key research areas of the MEMPOP project.

14/04/2026

📝 New Blog Post on MEMPOP.org

What does it mean to study populism from below? And what can anthropology bring to this question?

In our latest blog post, Diána Vonnák reflects on the challenges of approaching populism ethnographically, inviting us to rethink populism beyond simplified explanations and to take seriously the social worlds in which it resonates and takes shape.

👉 Read “Anthropology’s Populism Question: A Note on Studying Populism from Below” here: https://www.mempop.org/anthropologys-populism-question-a-note-on-studying-populism-from-below/

Diána Vonnák reflects on how anthropology can approach populism from below, not only as ideology or discourse, but as something embedded in everyday life, affect, and social experience.” Diána Vonnák reflects on how anthropology can approach populism from below, not only as ideology or discour...

31/03/2026

The latest fieldwork glimpse on our website comes from our associated researcher Astrea Nikolovska Astrea Aki Pejoväki, who visited the NATO bombing Monument on the 27th commemoration of the bombing this March.

The monument Večna vatra (“Eternal Flame”) in Belgrade was erected in 2000 as the last infrastructural intervention by the Slobodan Milošević government to commemorate the victims of the NATO bombing. The government fell in October of the same year, and the monument was never officially authorized or legally recognized. Built without permits, it occupies an ambiguous position between memorial and political statement. Over time, despite its unofficial status, it has become a recurring site of commemoration, with flowers and visitors gathered each year on March 24. Its persistence reveals how memory can take root beyond institutional frameworks, stabilizing itself through repetition even when it remains formally unacknowledged.

https://www.mempop.org/glimpses/

23/03/2026

📸 Another fieldwork glimpse comes from Lviv, by our postdoctoral researcher Diána Vonnák. Diána visited an exhibition organized by the Lviv NGO After Silence, followed by a workshop dedicated to locals searching for repressed relatives in the archives.

🔗 https://www.mempop.org/glimpses/

27/02/2026

📚 A new article by our associated researcher, Astrea Nikolovska, has been published in the EU–Balkan Observatory Highlights 2024–2025.

🎥 The contribution, titled “From Poetic Justice to Moral Rehabilitation: Criminality and War in Serbian Cinema” (pp. 51–56), examines how war criminals and wartime profiteers have been remembered, and increasingly normalised, in Serbia. The article was written in the context of renewed public debates surrounding the legacy of wartime violence, including recent “Sniper Safari” controversies related to the siege of Sarajevo.

Focusing on Serbian cinema as a key site of popular memory-making, the article explores how film has negotiated the absence of accountability for wartime criminality and traces the shifting moral image of the criminal in post-war cultural narratives.

Through this analysis, the article contributes to broader discussions on memory politics, popular culture, and post-conflict moral reconstruction in the Western Balkans.

The EU–Balkan Observatory Highlights 2024-2025 offers a panoramic view of a region in transformation, where social imaginations converge.

17/02/2026

🌧 In this rainy season, Franz Graf shares a fieldwork glimpse about how the Burgerland soil behaves under changing water regimes.

"It does not take much rainfall for the peaty soil to recall its centuries-long character as a fen – much to the concern of some businesses operating in these wetlands along the Austrian–Hungarian border."

🌧 Check out more of our researchers' glimpses at https://www.mempop.org/glimpses/

11/02/2026

A/Magazín: Proč populisté bodují? Cílí na voliče, kteří mají pocit nepřijetí a nejistoty
➡️ https://www.avcr.cz/cs/veda-a-vyzkum/humanitni-a-filologicke-vedy/Proc-populiste-boduji-Cili-na-volice-kteri-maji-pocit-neprijeti-a-nejistoty/

Etnologický ústav AV ČR

30/01/2026

🎓 MEMPOP Guest Lectures at Charles University

We’re happy to share that our two postdoctoral fellows, Laura Mafizzoli and Franz Graf, recently gave guest lectures at Charles University's Institute of Ethnology in Prague as part of the lecture series "Contemporary Ecological Anthropology," coordinated by Andre Thiemann.

🗣️ Franz Graf presented “Landscapes of Memory and Populism: Ecological and Social Inequalities in Burgenland Borderlands” (1 December 2025), sharing insights from ethnographic research in a peatland region between Austria and Hungary. His lecture examined how ecological interventions, water management, and rural inequalities intersect with memory politics and populist dynamics.

🗣️ Laura Mafizzoli presented “When Caves Become Mass Graves: Pits, Waste, and Collective Memory in Istria” (5 January 2026), drawing on her ethnographic fieldwork in the Istrian borderlands between Italy, Slovenia, and Croatia. Her lecture explored how karstic pits known as foibe have shifted in meaning—from sites of waste disposal to highly contested symbols of violence, memory, and political victimhood within nationalist and populist narratives.

These lectures are part of our commitment to opening the research developed within the project to students and broader academic audiences. We’re grateful for the opportunity to engage with students at Charles University and to exchange ideas across institutional and disciplinary boundaries.

https://www.mempop.org/output/mempop-postdocs-deliver-guest-lectures-at-charles-university/

28/01/2026

📸 Check out the newest fieldwork glimpse that our postdoctoral researcher Diána Vonnák shared from her fieldwork in Lviv

🔗 https://www.mempop.org/glimpses/

📖 Lviv’s Fedorov Square book market is iconic for its offering of second-hand books and trinkets such as old coins, medals, and pins. As decommunization laws were expanded to include anything that promotes the USSR in a new framework of state-led decolonisation, sellers have come under scrutiny and mundane items of the Soviet era all but disappeared.