Előadás | When Our History Meets Their History

Jovan Ivanovic, PhD candidate and Research Assistant at the Department of Psychology, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Belgrade will be our guest in March. His main research interests are intergroup relations, history education, and peer interaction.

When Our History Meets Their History: Strategies Young People in Serbia Use to Coordinate Conflicting Majority and Minority Narratives

When a multiethnic state, such as the former Yugoslavia, dissolves in a violent ethnic-based conflict, new generations grow up on exclusive and one-sided historical narratives. Therefore, we explored the strategies young ethnic Serbs use in building a more inclusive historical understanding out of two conflicting (majority and minority) narratives. The sample consisted of ten pairs of Serb high school seniors who had a task to jointly build one common narrative out of two one-sided narratives adapted from post-conflict textbooks of majority (Serb) and minority (Bosniak) ethnic groups. We used step-by-step dialogical analysis of semantic promoters in participants' interactions to capture how ingroup and outgroup perspectives are collaboratively positioned and coordinated. Our results suggest participants use various cognitive, affective, identity and value-based strategies to coordinate conflicting perspectives. We discuss how our findings contribute to developing evidence-based and interdisciplinary teaching environments for understanding sensitive past in post-conflict and divided societies.

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