Nina Vodopivec (PhD in Social Anthropology) is a research associate at the Institute of Contemporary History and an associate professor at the Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology at the Faculty of Arts in Ljubljana. Based on memory and post-socialist studies, she explored industrial workers’ memories of socialism, their experiences of post-socialist transformation and further economic restructuring in Slovenia. Her interest in researching industrial workers’ experiences of industrial work and deindustrialization in the last 20 years has been fueled primarily by their invisibility and misrepresentation in the public, academia and the politics. Her focus is on gender, labour, the body, the political-economic aspect, affect and embodiment, the intertwining of different temporalities, past, present, future, in addition to the experiences and representations of the past, she has also written about the visions and experiences of the future. Her work includes long-term observations of industrial restructuring and factory closures, ethnographic interviews with industrial workers and other factory employees, trade unionists, especially in the textile industry, as well as participant observation (Spinning factory Litija, 2004, 2005).
Project Statement:
Ethnography of Silence(s)
In her latest book Silencing the Sewing Machines, Work loss experiences and the collapse of the factory (published in Slovenian in 2021), based on the closure of the Mura garment factory in Slovenia (2009), she focused primarily on the emotional and physical experiences of deindustrialization and their misinterpretation by politics and the public. The study, based on ethnographic interviews with various production workers, other employees, doctors and some other local actors, prompted her to delve deeper into the silenced experiences of deindustrialization. She focuses on emotional and physical experiences, especially in relation to the body and trauma. Silence is understood as unprocessed trauma, the result of repressed and individualized experiences. In addition to collecting and exploring interviews and representations of industrial workers in media, literature, art and museums, she aims to create space for the further articulation of industrial workers’ experiences by relating individual experiences to structural changes and acknowledging the dispossession of industrial workers.
Her involvement in the Political History program at the Institute of Contemporary History allows her to historically contextualize the dispossession of industrial workers and the gendered industrial structure of feeling. She examines the role of industrial workers and women in the visions of socialist democracy in Yugoslavia, their experiences of self-management, their demands in the strikes of the late 1980s, the changing role of trade unions in the final years of socialism and their role, and the position of industrial labor in the new state. She is also involved in Cost Action Slow memory, Transformation of Work, where she collaborates on interviews with trade unions, their experiences of deindustrialization, solidarity and trade unionism.
Ethnographies of silence(s) is a collaborative project (https://fhs.upr.si/etnografija-tisine-ethnography-of-silences/ ) between different researchers and institutions that focuses on silenced histories, narratives and experiences of different social, national and ethnic groups and aims to question the methodological and interpretative framework for the study of silence.
