On Thursday, April 10th, 2025 at 12:00 PM (CET), we are hosting the CAS SEE Seminar with Deana Jovanović on “Staging the Promises: Everyday Future-Making in a Serbian Industrial Town” in conversation with the RECAS Fellow Ognjen Kojanić.
Deana Jovanović
Dr. Deana Jovanović is Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Utrecht University. Deana ethnographically studies how people in late-industrial and post-socialist environments shape futures, interact with pipes and cables, and live with risks and airborne particles. Deana has published widely on these topics in internationally recognized journals. “Staging the Promises” is her first book.
About the seminar
In this presentation, Deana Jovanović reveals how inhabitants of Bor, a Serbian copper-processing and mining town that lived through prosperous Yugoslav times and a post-socialist decline, were the audience theatrically performed promises of aspirational futures. She chronicles the efforts of the copper-processing company and the town’s authorities to theatrically perform promises of better economic, urban, environmental, infrastructural and post-industrial futures. Jovanović asks: What impact did the staging of promises have on the residents? What temporal, material, and political effects did these performances generate? How did they shape the citizens’ futures and their present? Jovanović offers ethnographic examples of ambivalence in people’s orientation to their futures, while residents balanced hope with despair, disillusionment, and dismay. The performances shaped the present, and how, in a Gramscian twist, they sustained hope alongside power dynamics that residents often criticized. She assesses the performative ways through which contemporary capitalist futures are remade. Bor represents a site that reflects a current global trend: staging the promises of enhanced futures today play a significant role in contemporary populist politics. Through them, distant futures become gradually withdrawn from people’s horizons.
Join Zoom meeting
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88989643663?pwd=VnZTOWRmdnl0WEZIdTczc1paZWtkdz09
Meeting ID: 889 8964 3663
Passcode: 328897
RECAS Fellowships
RECAS Fellowships
Fellowships are supported by OSF Western Balkans, ERSTE Foundation and Rockefeller Brothers Fund.