Visual Studies in and on Southeastern Europe. Introduction

Over the past few decades, visual studies have emerged as a vibrant interdisciplinary field, deeply influenced by the media and technological revolutions of recent years. The latest volume of Ethnologia Balkanica, published for the first time in an online format as a guest issue in Contemporary Southeastern Europe (CSE), focuses on visual culture within Southeastern Europe. This issue explores the role of visual media (ranging from photography to film and documentary) in shaping and reflecting questions of power, representation, gender, identity, and memory in Southeast Europe. The focus is specifically on images—both static and moving—with attention divided between their representational power (content analysis) and broader considerations such as their materiality, social biographies, and the ways in which they function as carriers of memory. Despite the growing prominence of visual studies, Southeast European scholarship has often lagged in fully embracing visual methodologies, still relying heavily on textual sources. This issue aims to bridge that gap, offering diverse perspectives on how visual culture informs the understanding of identity, history, and power in the region.

Elife Krasniqi

Elife Krasniqi


Elife Krasniqi is an anthropologist and writer. She has researched the changes and continuities within Albanian families, the patriarchal system, and feminist responses from the mid-20th century to the early 21st century in Kosovo. Her current research focuses on the Black African presence in the Balkans (the lineage of Ottoman domestic slavery), analyzing the intersection of gender, race, and class in their everyday lives from a visual perspective since the late 19th century.
 

Robert Pichler

Robert Pichler


Robert Pichler is a historical anthropologist and photographer specializing in migration and visual studies at the Institute for Habsburg and Balkan Studies at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. His most significant work in the field of visual studies was published in 2020, in collaboration with Edit Pula, titled Albania’s 90s: Photographs and Narratives. For further research on migration and visual topics, see https://www.oeaw.ac.at/ihb/personen/pichler-robert.
 


Articles

Contemporary
Southeastern Europe

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