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The wars of secession of the 1990s in the former Yugoslavia are generally apprehended as ethnonationalism gone awry, and their aftermath as one of liberal capitalist democracy bringing law and order to the Balkan region. In this talk, I focus on cultural texts, including performance, film, and fiction, that recall the 1990s war in a different light, bringing to the fore submerged histories of nonalignment  that resurface affinities across parts of the second and third worlds that were invisibilized and absorbed into a newly emerging international capitalist order at the Cold War’s end. These texts return to antifascist ethos of Yugoslav worker self-management to foreground a politics that has been largely erased or vilified in recent years. Doing so, I argue, these works shed new insight into the contemporary global rise of fascism.

Dr. Neda Atanasoski is Professor and Chair of the Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park and Associate Director of Education for the Artificial Intelligence Interdisciplinary Institute at Maryland (AIM). Atanasoski’s interdisciplinary research has focused on feminism and AI, feminist and critical race approaches to science and technology studies, AI and the future of work, militarism, and human rights and humanitarianism. She is the author of Humanitarian Violence: The U.S. Deployment of Diversity (2013), co-author of Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots, and the Politics of Technological Futures (2019), and co-editor of Postsocialist Politics and the Ends of Revolution (2022) and Technocreep and the Politics of Things Not Seen (2025). She was the editor of the journal Critical Ethnic Studies, the flagship journal of the Critical Ethnic Studies Association, from 2018-2024. Prior to UMD, Atanasoski was professor of Feminist Studies and founding co-director of the Center for Racial Justice at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Dr. Dana Ahern is an Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at USF. Ahern’s research primarily utilizes digital archives and oral histories to explore the technological development and utilization of transgender medicine over the past century, particularly between and across the United States and Eastern Europe. Prior to joining USF, Ahern completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Nevada, Reno in the Department of Gender, Race, and Identity where he taught classes in queer and trans studies. Ahern’s teaching and research interests primarily revolve around intersections of queer and trans studies, disability studies, and feminist science and technology studies.

Nataliia Tomenko is a visual artist, curator, cultural heritage expert, and Roma human rights activist from Ukraine. She completed her MA in Cultural Heritage Studies: Academic Research, Policy, and Management at Central European University in Vienna, Austria. Additionally, she holds an MA in Graphic Design from the Kharkiv State Academy of Design and Arts. Currently, she is a Deputy Director at the ARCA: Agency for the Advocacy of Roma Culture in Ukraine. Also, she is a coordinator of the History and Commemoration section at the ERIAC: European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture in Berlin. Nataliia combines her artistic production with research, in particular, her study topic is "Safeguarding of Roma Cultural Heritage in Ukraine During the War," which was developed within a fellow research position at the Forschungsstelle Antiziganismus at Heidelberg University. Meanwhile, she contributes to documenting the active participation of Roma in the civil movement and promotes Roma rights in a diversity of cultural expression.

Lesia Pagulich is a queer feminist researcher from Ukraine. She holds a PhD in Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies from the Ohio State University and has recently completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Vienna, Austria. Her research interests lie in the fields of critical race, queer, feminist, and postsocialist studies.

Azhar Dyussekenova is a PhD candidate in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan. She specializes in 20th- and 21st-century Russophone literature, with particular attention to postcolonial ecocriticism and queer-feminist writing in non-Russian contexts.

Alexa Kurmanov is a doctoral candidate in the Anthropology Department at the University of California, Berkeley. Their dissertation, Queer Nomads: The Politics of LGBT and Feminist Movements in (Post)socialist Kyrgyzstan, examines LGBT and feminist activism in Kyrgyzstan through the frameworks of Black feminist theorizations of intersectionality and critical Black ethnography. Kurmanov explores how state and public discourse reconstruct the category of “woman” in (post)socialist Kyrgyzstan and how this category intersects with issues of class, race, and space. Their work also investigates how local LGBT and feminist communities navigate, contest, and rearticulate notions of gender and sexuality in everyday life.

Mae A. Miller-Likhethe is an interdisciplinary scholar, curator, and educator. Her work broadly engages transnational social movements, cultural histories of infrastructure and empire, Black feminist thought and activism, and oceanic humanities. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she is working on her first book manuscript, Oceanic Groundings: Political Education and Place-Making on the Interwar Waterfront. She completed her Ph.D. in Earth and Environmental Sciences (Geography) from the City University of New York, Graduate Center in 2020, and held a President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Geography Department at UC Berkeley from 2020-2022. Her scholarly writings have appeared in Radical History Review, Urban Geography, and Dialogues in Human Geography. She has curated contemporary art exhibitions at VisArts (Washington, D.C. metro area), Apexart (New York City), and EFA Project Space (New York City) related to Black geographies, decolonial ecologies, and oceanic epistemologies.

Saltanat Shoshanova is a doctoral researcher at the University of Regensburg, focusing on queer feminist art, decoloniality, and memory production in Central Asia. Her doctoral research, conducted as part of the project titled “Light On! Queer Literary Cultures under Socialism,” explores queer art and culture in Central Asia. She is the co-editor of Queer-Feminist Solidarity and the East/West Divide (Peter Lang, 2019), and has published articles appearing in the Central Asian Survey and History & Memory.

Jamele Watkins researches the intersection of race and gender in the German speaking world. Her current book project, Roses for Angela, focuses on Angela Davis in the GDR. Her other articles cover Black hair in Germany, Black performance, and rap. As an assistant professor in German Studies at University of Minnesota, she teaches everything from the premodern to the present. Watkins received a degree in German Studies from University of Massachusetts Amherst.