ALPENECHO (2020-2023)

Alpenecho (Slovenian Folk-Pop Music as Politics: Perceptions, Receptions, and Identities, ARIS grant no. J6-2582) was a pioneering three-year basic research project dedicated to Slovenian folk-pop music, a proverbially “national”, yet hitherto underresearched popular-music genre. Funded by the Slovenian Research Agency and led by Peter Stanković, in collaboration with Natalija Majsova, Jasmina Šepetavc, Jernej Kaluža, Robert Bobnič, Mitja Velikonja, and Ksenija Šabec, this project examined the “Slovenianness” of folk pop from the perspective of its texts and performances, audiences, gatekeepers, and other stakeholders, innovatively combining quantitative and qualitative methods. The project generated some preliminary research results that have fed into the MEMPOP concept.

FRAMNAT (2014-2018)

FRAMNAT: Framing the Nation and Collective Identity in Croatia: Political Rituals and the Cultural Memory of Twentieth Century Traumas (FRAMNAT) was a four-year project funded by the Croatian Science Foundation. Led by Vjeran Pavlaković, the project brought together a team of young scientists with the common goal of developing innovative methodologies for researching the culture of memory and cognitive linguistic analyses. The project analyzed top-down and bottom-up strategies of framing the nation and collective identities by studying the commemorative practices created after the wars in the 20th century on the territory of Croatia. The project focussed on the speech of the political elites (specifically the president of the state and the president of the government), the speech of the political opposition, but also examined other relevant social factors (religious organizations, anti-fascist organizations, veterans’ organizations, etc.) that support or they discredit official narratives. Such discourses were analyzed on three levels: top-down political elites, media representations and bottom-up reactions of Croatian society.

TECHNOPST (2023-2025)

Remembering the Early Digital Age: Cultural-Studies and Media-Archaeological Perspectives on Technotopism, Technopessimism, and Technostalgia (TECHNOPST) is a basic research project that examines the relationship between technological transformations and cultural memories. Funded by the Slovenian Research and Innovation Agency (grant no. N6-0302),TECHNOPST researches the cultural and collective memory of the early digital age (late 1970s-2000) as a transcultural and transmedial mode of remembrance and commemoration. TECHNOPST is designed to analyse how transcultural memory of the early digital age is structured in terms of transmedia world-like experiences, offering a way of thinking about how technology-related memory generates themes, settings, narratives, temporalities, value systems, tropes, and practices that are equally important for our relationship to the past and scenarios of possible futures.  The project team (Natalija Majsova, Jasmina Šepetavc, Robert Bobnič, Jernej Kaluža, Nina Cvar, Aljoša Pužar) zooms in on empirical case studies from the South-Eastern European space (Ljubljana, Rijeka, Belgrade), where the current global technostalgic boom has coincided with revivals of socialist-utopian ideas and nationalist reappropriations, to map out the technological texture of transcultural memory worlds across three regimes: popular-cultural production (O1); communities of practice (O2); archives and media (O3).