The PhD research focuses on the intergenerational transmission of war memories among families who lived through the war and under the siege of Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and in migration. The principal aim of this study is to explore the intergenerational transmission of the memory of war among families living in Sarajevo and the Bosnian diaspora in the USA and the EU. Looking at local and transnational dimensions, it was essential to show how intergenerational transmission of war memories is transmitted, experienced, and reshaped by research interlocutors 30 years after the war. Some of the main research questions were: How is the siege of Sarajevo remembered by those who directly experienced it? What are parents telling their children? What was it like for the children to learn of their parents’ war experiences? How does war memory play out in everyday family life?
The project examines these questions using fieldwork data collected using semi-structured and biographical narrative interviews, along with participant observation, from 2022 to 2024.
The argument for this PhD was that this research is advancing understanding of the dynamics of collective memory within the family in two distinct social contexts: (a) where there is no agreed official national narrative of the past and daily exposure to contestation and (b) where narrative transmission is optional and uncontested in the social milieu.
The project focuses on memory and migration studies using a multidisciplinary approach to studying the intergenerational transmission of war memory in families. It incorporates sociology and social psychology to adopt a critical-realist position, acknowledging the complexities of memory transmission. This project uses social representation theory, a sociologically informed theory that studies common-sense beliefs that generate identity and social action. It emphasizes the dynamic nature of shifting representations in late modernity and the development of cultural versions of reality. Maurice Halbwachs’ ideas of “social frameworks of memory” and “collective memory” have informed both social psychological and sociological approaches to memory.
The National Science Centre funds the project within the program Preludium under grant agreement NCN grant Preludium 20.
