journal articles by Ana Vilenica
Voluntas: International Journals of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations, 2026
This article initiates a conversation on how contemporary Eastern European peripheralization and ... more This article initiates a conversation on how contemporary Eastern European peripheralization and the hegemony of the energy transition impact social struggles, introducing the concept of "Periphery in Movement." Through the examination of Serbia's anti-extractivist movement against the mining corporation Rio Tinto, we ground this concept through three core specificities. The first is the power imbalance positioning the movement in opposition to corporate interests, the European Union, and national elites. The second is the conflictual convergence of civil actors, who have undergone significant ideological and practical transformations from the Yugoslav Wars to the present. The third specificity is the "how" of Periphery in Movement and its new political propositionalities and potentials. Periphery in Movement expands beyond traditional civil society and social movement studies by addressing struggles at the Eastern European periphery that build propositional and life-preserving resistance.
City Analysis of Urban Change, Theory, Action , 2023
The paper outlines the causes, unfolding and outcomes of the boom and bust of Swiss franc (CHF) l... more The paper outlines the causes, unfolding and outcomes of the boom and bust of Swiss franc (CHF) loans in Serbia with a focus on their relation to class mobility in the setting of a transition to the market economy that transformed the methods of housing acquisition. This process resulted in an extreme housing precarity and declassing for segments of the post-Yugoslav middle and working classes, which has manifested in their dispossession of secure housing, savings, pensions, and the sense of having social security, working towards one's own house and building a family. We demonstrate how besides contributing to declassing, housing precarity played a significant role in rendering CHF-indexed housing debt an opening that activated individual and collective strategies of resistance. Resistance by debtors, and its articulation in the public sphere, relied on multiple logics and tactics-from appeals for existing laws to be respected, to demands for a legal codification of the right to home, to the physical prevention of evictions. These sometimes contradictory and competing logics reflected varied social and economic positions of debtors with their related moralities as well as corresponding different reasonings on acquiring housing, social mobility, and approaches to the financialization of everyday life. By combining the analysis of debtors' personal narratives, public discourses, and the political economy of dependent financialization in Serbia, we flesh out the connection between financialization, housing, ideas about social mobility, post-socialist transformation and declassing. The article reveals how and why predatory loans in post-socialist conditions lead to declassing through precarity and new forms of collective action.
Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies , 2023
In this paper, we follow Jelena Savić, the only Romani critical race theoretician, poet, and deco... more In this paper, we follow Jelena Savić, the only Romani critical race theoretician, poet, and decolonial activist in Serbia in her call for unpacking the colonial legacy and whiteness behind the feminist politics. Accordingly, we trace the historical trajectory through which whiteness has been introduced into and became paradigmatic of specific post-Yugoslav Serbian feminist activism and theories. In line with Savić's critique of the feminist politics in Serbia, we identify two types of gadji (non-Roma European) feminism(s): gadji saviorism and gadji performative solidarity. In the first section we outline the notion of gadji saviorism as an optics perceiving Roma women as victims of the purportedly backward Romani way of life and the supposed inherent poverty from which Roma women need to be "saved" or "uplifted" by the enlightened Eurocentric culture(s). We point both to similarities and differences between colonial-state antiziganist subjugation of Roma women and children in the Austro-Hungarian empire/kingdom and the contemporary Serbian feminist "savior politics" aligned with transnational European and national Serbian policies. In the second section, we look at the (post)socialist genealogies behind the concept which Savić identified as white feminist "performative solidarity" and its race-blind approach to both feminism and solidarity based on its (self)conflation with the ideology of "sisterhood and unity". Our research shows how these ideas nested in the Serbian feminist scene following the fall of socialism and the end of Cold War.
Radical Housing journal, 2022
In Issue 2.1 (May 2020), our editorial collective published ‘Covid-19 and housing struggles: The ... more In Issue 2.1 (May 2020), our editorial collective published ‘Covid-19 and housing struggles: The (re)makings of austerity, disaster capitalism, and the no return to normal’. The paper ended with the following provocation: ‘It is imperative to make the impossibility of returning to normal a praxis: a terrain of inquiry and a terrain of struggle. This means that we need to think about what to do next with what we have at hand’ (RHJ Editorial Collective, 2020, p. 25). Two years later, we reflect on this question through this collective editorial with new clarity. We are writing at a point in which there are old and new wars further degrading the living conditions of many, bolstering the power of fascist regimes. Further, there is a widespread urgency to declare the pandemic over and as an episode of the past, thereby paving the way for a return to ‘normal’. What is this normal that too many seem to be longing for? It seems especially clear now that normal simply means the reproduction of a racial capitalist machine that continues to accumulate profit through violence and dispossession. The state has continued to consolidate power, enact violence, and inflict harm upon those who need protection. Rather than safeguard people’s homes and communities, the state extends its protection and power to landlords, private property, and capital. This is the context in which we, in collaboration with the Unequal Cities Network, have decided to focus our 4.1 Radical Housing Journal issue on the nexus of continuous crisis, carcerality, housing precarity, and abolition.
Historical Social Research, 2021
The COVID-19 pandemic added a new layer of consequences to a care crisis that was already harsh i... more The COVID-19 pandemic added a new layer of consequences to a care crisis that was already harsh in "post-socialist" Serbia. This paper examines the failures of the care infrastructure in Serbia during the pandemic and the resulting intensification of temporary networks of care. We look at housing as a key care infrastructure in the pandemic and discuss how care thrives across the urban space. To conceptualise how housing is sustained as a care infrastructure in the post-Yugoslav context, we introduce the notion of infra-commoning. We discuss how infra-commoning generates dynamic social and economic reproduction patterns that are the foundation of social organisation. Finally, we analyse anti-eviction struggles as an infracommoning practice and explain how collective efforts of solidarity, mutual aid, and self-care are thwarted and rendered legally impossible.
AM Journal of Art and Media Studies, 2021
This paper discusses the role of artists engaged in live-work property guardian schemes and their... more This paper discusses the role of artists engaged in live-work property guardian schemes and their potentials to act in a dignifying way at sites of struggle over the regeneration of council housing in London. To gain this understanding, I will describe how artists are embedded in this context by looking at the interaction between artists and property guardian enterprises working on housing estates in London. I will critically examine the artist role through the lance of artwashing critical method, namely allyship of the art world with the real estate industry in the process of social cleansing of housing estates in the UK. Following this, I will discuss the potential of artists to act in a dignified way, drawing on interviews with artists that have lived as property guardians. I will talk about the frustration of artists that stems from their circumstances, namely torn between the necessity to survive within an unaffordable housing market in London and the wish to make art in an uncompromised way. Studying the instrumentalization of artists employed by real-estate industry property guardian enterprises and the artists' attempts to resist this instrumentalization is vital for any understanding of the recent mutations in the capitalist management of housing and art and vital for the attempt to establish new sites of artistic urban struggle for housing justice.
Social Policy (Koinoniki Politiki), 2021
In Balkans region, uneven development under global capitalism has led to significant differences ... more In Balkans region, uneven development under global capitalism has led to significant differences in
housing commodification patterns, related (social and housing) policy and associated inequalities.
In this article we describe commodification patterns in Slovenia, Serbia and Greece by considering
the diversity existing in the semiperiphery. We do this by comparing processes of privatisation of
housing, development of the rental sector, strategies to homeownership and legal frameworks of
protection of property and housing rights. We find some similarities in specific individual and familial
commodification patterns and also pronounced inequalities but also semiperiphery diversity, which
has been produced and maintained by the presence (or absence) of policies and state care provided
for certain vulnerable groups. These diverse aspects arise from specific local, regional and global
histories of housing struggles that mean the responses to them have varied. In this research, we
show that Balkans semiperipheral territories must not be regarded as a passive background but as a
landscape in which active agents participate in creating and transforming commodification patterns.
Radical Housing Journal, 2021
During the pandemic, anti-eviction and food solidarity work has continued to be an important self... more During the pandemic, anti-eviction and food solidarity work has continued to be an important self-organised, social, political, peopleactivist and radical infrastructure. Although the catastrophic effects of the so-called "funniest virus in history" in Serbia are gaining momentum, the State not only does not have mechanisms to counter them but systematically hinders and criminalizes self-organized mutual aid efforts. The Roof, a self-organized anti-eviction direct-action collective, has had to be more active than ever. While evictions were temporarily put on hold during the first lockdown, the collective shifted its focus to solidarity with the most socially deprived individuals, collecting and redirecting (mutual) aid, especially in the form of food, hygiene products, and pharmaceuticals. However, after the curfew and lock-down came to an end, public-private bailiffs resumed orchestrating evictions. Although solidarity played an essential role in survival through the pandemic, the criminalization of anti-eviction activities also intensified during this period. An additional burden on a socially deprived, already pandemically-devastated people is the suddenly announced transfer of almost a million old debt cases to public-private bailiffs over the course of the next two years.
Radical Housing Journal, 2021
This issue 3.1 of the Radical Housing Journal is very rich in content. Embedded within it, we pre... more This issue 3.1 of the Radical Housing Journal is very rich in content. Embedded within it, we present two special issues, one on tenant organizing and resistance, and a second on urban and scholar activism. Further, our Conversations section centers on COVID-19 and housing struggles in the Global South. Within such diversity of content, this editorial aims to discuss past and present housing struggles, as well as the alternative, multidimensional and foundational knowledge they produce. Along with our authors, as editors of this issue, we have grappled, both personally and collectively, with multiple questions related to collaborative knowledge production at a unique time in which a global pandemic has arguably placed housing struggles under a global microscope.
Radical Housing Journal, 2020
The Issue 2.1 Editorial Collective has been hit by surprise by the Covid-19 pandemic in many comp... more The Issue 2.1 Editorial Collective has been hit by surprise by the Covid-19 pandemic in many complex ways. After taking time to acknowledge the rupture, we decided to go forward with this issue as a way of joining the urgent discussion about the present and future of housing organizing. With this issue, we bring past experiences of struggle into the present as a basis for rethinking the housing doomsday machine that we got stuck with while trying to handle the pandemic and disastrous national quarantine management. Together with articles that reflect on the past experiences of housing struggles, we also opened this issue up for collective reflections about the present and the post-pandemic futures of housing and home.
Edited by Alejandra Reyes, Ana Vilenica, Claire Bowman, Elana Eden, Erin McElroy and Michele Lancione
Radical Housing Journal, 2020
Seemingly overnight, the use value of housing as a life-nurturing, safe place is at the center of... more Seemingly overnight, the use value of housing as a life-nurturing, safe place is at the center of political discourse, policy-making, and new governmentalities. The right to suitable and secure shelter has shifted from the “radical” margins to the object of unprecedented public policy interventions worldwide. Writing collectively from the relative privilege of our (often precarious) homes, we sketch out a space to reflect on the centrality of housing and home to the Covid-19 crisis, to disentangle the key nexus between housing, the aftermath of the 2008 crisis, austerity, and the current pandemic, and connect current responses to longer-term trajectories of dispossession and disposability, bordering, ethno-nationalism, financialization, imperialism, capitalism, patriarchy, and racism. We argue that much is to be learned from collective organizing and mutual aid in the context of previous moments of disaster capitalism.
The RHJ Editorial Collective are Ana Vilenica, Erin McElroy, Mara Ferreri, Melissa Fernández Arrigoitia, Melissa García-Lamarca and Michele Lancione.
ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 2019
This article tackles contradictions of social housing in contemporary Serbia. It shows how residu... more This article tackles contradictions of social housing in contemporary Serbia. It shows how residualised social housing does not bring justice to marginalised groups affected by capitalist expropriation. In this article, the term (anti-)social(ist) housing will be introduced to describe the historically grounded, incomplete, and contradictory solutions that social housing is currently offering in Serbia, as well as its antisocial nature. By focusing on a particular case study, the Kamendin project situated in Zemun Polje, one of the very few social housing projects in Belgrade, the article explores debt crises produced by mechanisms of social housing; the production of racism, segregation, and responsibilisation; and mechanisms of passing responsibility on all levels in an attempt of the state to spend as little money as possible. (Anti-)social(ist) housing is further assessed as a space of struggle that includes different survival and resistance tactics that are used in order to oppose social housing violence. Following that, the article will focus on the possibilities of the activist art project Kamendynamics and the theatre peace How does fascism not disappear? Zlatija Kostić: I sued myself to confront the racialisation and culturalisation of problems by introducing collaborative visual, class-based, and historical-materialist analyses. By documenting and conceptualising mechanisms of social housing and reflecting on the role of activist art within housing struggles, I aim to contribute to anti-segregation and anti-racist housing struggles in Eastern European cities and beyond.
Dialogues in Human Geography, 2019
Citizenship Studies, 2019
This article examines Western Balkans/EU bordering and debordering practices through a borderscap... more This article examines Western Balkans/EU bordering and debordering practices through a borderscape method in the context of the geopolitical positionality and (de)institutionalization of migrant housing in Serbia. From this perspective, a new ‘border variation’ can be seen emerging after the securitarian turn, transforming the external borderscape of the EU into a space of circular movement. The article sheds light on discourses, practices and places that constitute these spaces of circular movement within the EU external borderscape. In particular, the Western Balkans borderscape is investigated with reference to Serbian migrant housingscapes emerging at the intersection of state-run camps and migrant collective self-organized squatted housing. The focus on migrant housingscapes points to the interconnectedness of camps and squats in the process of facilitating circular movement by the state, the production of mobile commons as a debordering practice, and the production of visual representations of the external border as stabilized ‘scape’ for the EU.
Radical Housing Journal, 2019
The first issue of the Radical Housing Journal focuses on practices and theories of organizing as... more The first issue of the Radical Housing Journal focuses on practices and theories of organizing as connected to post-2008 housing struggles. As 2008 was the dawn of the subprime mortgage and financial crisis, and as the RHJ coalesced ten years later in its aftermath, we found this framing apropos. The 2008 crisis was, after all, a global event, constitutive of new routes and formations of global capital that in turn impacted cities, suburbs, and rural spaces alike in highly uneven, though often detrimental, ways. Attentive to this, we hoped to think through its globality and translocality by foregrounding “post-2008” as field of inquiry. What new modes of knowledge pertinent to the task of housing justice organizing could be gained by thinking 2008 through an array of geographies, producing new geographies of theory?
Uploads
journal articles by Ana Vilenica
housing commodification patterns, related (social and housing) policy and associated inequalities.
In this article we describe commodification patterns in Slovenia, Serbia and Greece by considering
the diversity existing in the semiperiphery. We do this by comparing processes of privatisation of
housing, development of the rental sector, strategies to homeownership and legal frameworks of
protection of property and housing rights. We find some similarities in specific individual and familial
commodification patterns and also pronounced inequalities but also semiperiphery diversity, which
has been produced and maintained by the presence (or absence) of policies and state care provided
for certain vulnerable groups. These diverse aspects arise from specific local, regional and global
histories of housing struggles that mean the responses to them have varied. In this research, we
show that Balkans semiperipheral territories must not be regarded as a passive background but as a
landscape in which active agents participate in creating and transforming commodification patterns.
Edited by Alejandra Reyes, Ana Vilenica, Claire Bowman, Elana Eden, Erin McElroy and Michele Lancione
The RHJ Editorial Collective are Ana Vilenica, Erin McElroy, Mara Ferreri, Melissa Fernández Arrigoitia, Melissa García-Lamarca and Michele Lancione.