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Department of Anthropology and Sociology

Ms Špela Drnovšek Zorko

BA Liberal Arts and Sciences, University College Utrecht, MA Anthropology and Cultural Politics, Goldsmiths

Overview

Spela Drnovsek Zorko
Department of Anthropology and Sociology

Graduate Teaching Assistant

Name:
Ms Špela Drnovšek Zorko
Email address:
Thesis title:
Tracing the gendered ‘home’ through diasporic family stories of Yugoslavia.
Year of Study:
2012-13
Internal Supervisors

Biography

Špela Drnovšek Zorko holds a BA in Liberal Arts and Sciences from University College Utrecht (2009) and an MA in Anthropology and Cultural Politics from Goldsmiths, University of London (2011). Her past research has dealt with gender and Balkan identity in the context of performative art, and with refugee family narratives in the aftermath of Yugoslavia. She has presented her work at ASA 2012 (New Delhi) and EASA 2012 (Paris) and has also worked as an independent researcher and freelance poetry translator. Špela joined the Centre for Migration and Diaspora Studies in September 2012 as an Early Career Researcher on the Marie Curie ITN project Diasporic Constructions of Home and Belonging (CoHaB).

PhD Research

My research addresses the reception and interpretation of family narratives in the context of the second generation British-Yugoslav diaspora(s), in order to ask how mediated memories of Yugoslavia shape gendered notions of home, nation and belonging at the intersection of diaspora and post-socialism. Rather than focusing solely on confluences of a unified imaginary home, I am also interested in their absences or disjunctures, the differential longings for “home” against a historical background that has emphasised unity and solidarity as well as divisions and essentialised ethnicity. My emphasis on gendered imaginaries of belonging reflects both the fact that gender is always inextricable from discourses of nations and homes and that it differentially shapes lived experience.

Starting with the question “How do diasporic family stories of former Yugoslavia construct the imagined, gendered ‘home’ in second generation narratives?” I want to ask what the concept of diaspora does to 'nation', through remembering, recounting, and forgetting, as well as what a nation does to 'diaspora', through political upheavals, discursive positionings, and new boundary formations.

PhD Conferences

  • CoHaB meeting, Oxford, November 2012
  • Life Narratives and Gendered Citizenship Seminar, Utrecht, January 2013

PhD Affiliations

Initial Training Network CoHaB.

Teaching