Crafting Futures in the Aftermath of Hope: Gender, State, and Affect in Kosovo

Talk by Rozafa Berisha (seeFField Visiting Fellow) in the SNAKLAB series, organized by the seeFField project in cooperation with IOS Regensburg.

This lecture discusses the relations between promises of statehood and gendered futures in Kosovo, a state-building context with an unfolding Europeanising agenda. For young women, historically marginal within gender and ethno-national hierarchies, Kosovo’s independence in 2008 promised a new era of state-oriented hopefulness. It did so by promoting a new model of national womanhood ingrained with the principles of liberty, empowerment, and meritocracy; the core tenets of a projected “European future”. However, the fieldwork Rozafa Berisha conducted a decade after independence, revealed that many of these promises remained unmet. In this lecture, she traces ethnographically how young women from low-income backgrounds navigate the disconnect between their novel hopes of post-independence and their lived realities through individualized future-making strategies. Centering around an ethnographic and gendered account of the state, the talk reflects on what it means to form an affective attachment to a political project that struggles to materialize.