Damir Arsenijevic
Post-Doc Fellow
Damir Arsenijević is a literary theorist and psychoanalyst, working at the intersection of academia, activism, and art. In 2019, he set up “Zemlja-Voda-Zrak”, a platform for environmental humanities in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Research Bosnia and Herzegovina is poisoned economically, politically, and environmentally. This is the legacy of the 1992-1995 war led by ethno-nationalist elites. This is the terror of peace: a continuation of the production of people and social relations as waste, managing people as waste, constantly wasting lives and wasting environments in the rampant chase for profits by these ethno-nationalists. The working people (radni narod), a political subject who once owned the factories, was destroyed in the war. New ethnic elites stripped factories of assets and robbed workers of jobs. They downplay environmental threats, while workers daily risk and sacrifice their lives to prevent ecological disasters. I restore working-class environmentalism as a means of fighting and caring for community wellbeing. I use a range of academic and artistic genres: from pamphlets and workshops to graphic novels and art interventions, to connect disparate societal actors in order to think of working-class environmentalism as community engagement that is not captured by clientelism, bribery, and ethno-nationalist politics.