Description
My paper will be focused on activist archives, including organizational documents, public statements, and media clippings based on the interviews with women activists from the Oral History Kosovo platform. The research will use a comparative intergenerational lens to examine how the memory of the 1990s—a period of grassroots resistance against state oppression—acts as a resource for contemporary activists. This will be supplemented with a digital ethnography of online platforms and social media, which are key spaces for contemporary youth activism. I will analyze how activists use these platforms to express frustration, build solidarity, and challenge dominant state narratives. This will provide a crucial layer to understanding how disappointment, frustration and disillusionment circulates in the digital realm and how it is channeled into new forms of protest. Building upon Lauren Berlant's cruel optimism and Ilana Feldman’s untimely optimism, this research will engage with Jessica Greenberg’s critical intervention of disappointment to analyze how these emotional attachments are sustained within a broader “politics of waiting,” a state of constant precarity and aspiration for a future that may never fully materialize.
