Book launch: Utopia of the Uniform
20 March 2024, 6:00 pm–8:00 pm
![Book cover of Utopia of the Uniform](/ssees/sites/ssees/files/styles/large_image/public/events/utopia_of_the_uniform.png?itok=YJiqC5dJ)
Please join Dr Tanja Petrović and a panel of distinguished scholars for the launch of the hot off the press 'Utopia of the Uniform' (Duke University Press, 2024).
This event is free.
Event Information
Open to
- All
Availability
- Yes
Cost
- Free
Organiser
-
SSEES
Location
-
Masaryk roomUCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies16 Taviton streetLondonWC1H 0BW
explores how the compulsory service for young men in the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA) created bonds across ethnic, religious, and social lines. These bonds persisted even after the horrific violence of the 1990s, in which many of these men found themselves on opposite sides of the front lines. In Utopia of the Uniform, Tanja Petrović draws on memories and material effects of dozens of JNA conscripts to show how their experience of military service points to futures, forms of collectivity, and relations between the state and the individual different from those that prevailed in the post-Yugoslav reality. Petrović argues that the power of repetitive, ritualized, and performative practices that constituted military service in the JNA provided a framework for drastically different men to live together and befriend each other. While Petrović and her interlocutors do not idealize the JNA, they acknowledge its capacity to create interpersonal relationships and affective bonds that brought the key political ideas of collectivity, solidarity, egalitarianism, education, and comradeship into being.
![Tanja Petrovic](/ssees/sites/ssees/files/styles/small_image/public/tanja_petrovic.jpg?itok=ud5wiV--)
Speakers:
Dr Tanja Petrović (author), Head of the Institute of Culture and Memory Studies, Research Centre of Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts
Dr Elena Stavrevska, University of Bristol
Dr Jessie Barton-Hronesova, UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies
Dr Nicholas Lackenby, UCL Anthropology
Chair:
Dr Jelena Ćalić, UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies