April 2016

INTERDISCIPLINARY CLASSROOM: "POLITICIZED MEMORIES-THE BATTLE FOR THE TERRITORY OF COLLECTIVE MEMORY"

At the very opening the rector of University of Zenica, Mr. Dževad Zečić greeted the present ones and the session of lectures was opened by a guest lecturer, professor of history and journalist Christopher Bennett. Bennett said that the cause of this socio-political chaos in our country lies in the electoral system and structural issue because they cause the discord among people. Neuropsychiatrist Amra Delić in her lecture entitled "War Trauma: Sexual Violence and 'Children of War'" spoke about the ways and purposes in which rape can be used and in the case of war it was used as its weapon. More than 20 000 women, girls and men were sexually abused and the most prominent victims were female persons from 12 to 48 years. The accurate number of victims of sexual violence is not known yet since the victims live in silence due to the patriarchal frame within which we live, and the horrific fact is that the majority of victims meet their tormentors on a daily basis. History professor Dubravko Lovrenović delivered a lecture on the drama of nationalistic salvation and so-called great and small nations that exterminated themselves mutually in their own autism and perished for the glory of nation, i.e. fiction which is very challenging to describe.
Drago Bojić, PhD, questioned from the theological-eschatological perspective if memory, forgiveness and reconciliation as important theological categories can become ethical and political values and how the border between cultural amnesia and cultural memory obsession is very thin. Forgiving and conciliatory memory which will not be (only) the memory of suffered injustices, but (in the first place) memory of someone else's suffering is the purpose and goal of healing.

The motto "forgive, but not to forget" makes a solid foundation for adoption of religious values for the sake of nationalistic ideology which, in the end, nationalizes the instance of God and converts Him into ideological value instead of metaphysical one, said professor of contemporary Bosniak literature Enver Kazaz. He added that in the bestiary of memory victims are used as ethical justification for the internal homogenization and militarization of the ethnos. The jurist and MA of cultural-religious studies Srđan Šušnica discussed gender equality in the sense of ideological matrix of street names' changes in Banja Luka and B&H in general. The freedom of gender construction is under the great pressure of ethno-religious radicalism and criminal/militant abuse of liberal ideas with the concept of "law of the stronger". In such way people who are economically and politically most unscrupulous and powerful with strong militant and violent impulses reach their goals which are ethno-macho and clerical-nationalistic construction of public space, said Šušnica. The interesting data is that the names of 246 streets have been changed and only 7% of streets are dedicated to women. Additionally, only one street dedicated to a woman is in the centre of Banja Luka, while the rest of that 7% is in the isolated areas of the city.
Media reported on this very classroom and for more information, please see the following link:
http://www.zenicablog.com/?s=
interdisciplinarna

After the discussion it was concluded that a lot of hard and profound work is required on the deconstruction of nationalistic and ideological myths in order to help people who have undergone their atrocities and that task belongs to the new generations..