Brownbag Seminars: Engaging in SEE: (In)visible Movements

Engageing in SEE: (In)visible Movements.

This seminar explores social engagement and its new dimensions in South East Europe, bringing to life a number of grassroots’ social movements and popular protests from local to national level. Desperately seeking for some forms of democratic innovation, these movements struggle for providing a more consensual maximization of public welfare and subsequently advancing democracy. Horvat and Stiks (2014) even argue that these new movements struggle for a radically democratic vision of society. However, in spite few recently published volumes addressing this theme in the region, we still lack thorough analysis of the broad spectre of movements we are witnessing in SEE region, especially those that centre around concrete societal issues close to the ordinary actors’ everyday experience, and performed outside of the capitals of SEE countries. The analysis presented here focus on the challenges in performance, social vision beyond movements and their perspectives. This endeavour is based on the open discussion that engaged citizens and local movements in Sabac, Sombor, Loznica and Bor in Serbia, followed by focus group with representatives of these local initiatives. Their engagement is completely absent from the public sphere on the national level.