Picturing Modernist Future: Women Illustrators and Childhood Conceptions in Socialist Yugoslavia

The SOC-ILL action introduces the first systematic comparative interdisciplinary investigation into women illustrators in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY, 1945–1991), paying attention to all former Yugoslav contexts and combining art and literary historical and theoretical approaches with cultural studies for novel critical insights into socialist aesthetic education and subjectivation of children, especially in relation to gender.

Through the examination of multiple archives and interviews with older generations of professionals working within the feminized sector of publishing for minors, the action works against their disappearance before any academic documentation can take place.

The action entails 3 main objectives: (i) To explore and contextually interpret distinctive childhood- and gender conceptions within Yugoslav publishing for minors; (ii) To map the practice of women illustrators for minors at the intersection between local, regional and international artistic and aesthetic education movements; (iii) To intervene into academic “archiving” by supporting a more complex understanding of socialist modernist aesthetic education and subjectivation.

Thus the action contributes to redefinition of the relation between communicative and cultural memory of the European socialist past in the broader fields of Yugoslav, Slavonic, and socialist studies and the disciplines of art, literary and cultural history.

These objectives can only be achieved in the proposed collaboration, with my cross-sectorally situated research – my expertise on (post)socialist women’s authorship, i.e. a pioneering thesis on gender, war, and memory and a variety of international scientific and art events – and the beneficiary’s distinctive expertise within the emerging (post)Yugoslav studies.

This unique transfer will ensure a notable academic footprint, my full re-integration into science and foster impactful scientific cognizance within a broad range of stakeholders.