Konceptualiziranje nacije i kolektivnih identiteta u Hrvatskoj: Politički rituali i kulturalna memorija trauma 20. stoljeća

Framing the Nation and Collective Identity in Croatia: Political Rituals and the Cultural Memory of Twentieth Century Traumas

Commemorations and other political rituals are key components of a nation’s cultural memory, crucial for the construction and reinforcement of ideological, ethnic, economic, gender, and other identities. FRAMNAT will involve a dynamic team of young scholars and develop innovative methodologies for cultural memory research and cognitive linguistics analysis relevant for Croatia’s academic and policy-making community, as well as a much broader transnational audience. Croatia’s commemorative culture regarding the wars of the 20th century serves as a platform for politicians to operate within the nation-building narratives. Our project will analyze both top-down and bottom-up strategies of framing the nation and collective identities through commemorative practices of World War Two and the Homeland War in Croatia. These discourses will be analyzed at three levels: top-down political discourse (elites), media representation and transmission, and the reception of the narratives in Croatian society (bottom-up reactions). Seven commemorations related to World War 2 and the Homeland War will be observed and analyzed using corpus-based linguistic analysis and frame analysis. The media representations of the commemorative events and opinion poll data will likewise be analyzed in order to map how these discourses are transmitted and received in Croatian society. The project results will be disseminated via a regularly updated website (which includes a database of the collected research materials), journal articles, an edited volume, and papers presented at international conferences. Students and other members of the scholarly community will be encouraged to participate in the project through a variety of workshops to be held at the University of Rijeka. The long-term goal is to develop a Cultural Memory Research Center with scientific methods which can be applied to other regional and international case studies.

Cultural memory, war, discourse analysis, collective identity, media