Emina Zoletic

PhD student, Doctoral school of social sciences, Faculty of Sociology, Centre for Research on Social Memory at theUniversity of Warsaw, Poland

Emina Zoletic is a final-year doctoral student at the Doctoral School of Social Science, Faculty of Sociology, at the University of Warsaw. She also holds degrees in psychology and clinical psychology, a master’s degree in public health (University Paris Descartes), and a master’s degree in epidemiology (Erasmus Medical Center, Rotterdam). Her doctoral project focuses on the intergenerational transmission of war and postwar and migration memory within families of those who lived through the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), 1992-1996. Her research and public engagement sit at the intersection of sociology, social psychology, and memory and migration studies, grounded in both her psychological background and transnational scholarly trajectory. The project focuses on memory and migration studies using a multidisciplinary approach to studying the intergenerational transmission of war memory in families. It incorporates sociology and social psychology to adopt a critical-realist position, acknowledging the complexities of memory transmission.

During her PhD program, she was doing a CEEPUS fellowship at the University of Vienna, Institute of Sociology. For her Ph.D. research, she has been awarded the Preludium grant from the National Science Center (Poland), the Zeit Stiftung Bucerius Scholarship, and the CEFRES Junior Fellowship in Prague (Czech Republic). She was awarded a grant for a Fulbright visiting researcher at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, New York, from 2023 to 2024.

Statement of interest:

My research centers on social and family memory, silences, and the intergenerational transmission of narratives and memories of the prewar, war, and postwar periods in post-socialist Yugoslavia, with Bosnia and Herzegovina as a case study. Drawing on theoretical frameworks, including the concept of slow violence, memory politics, and social frameworks of memory, with this fellowship I would work on one chapter that
interrogates how particular voices and experiences were suppressed or hidden through institutional mechanisms and from below through the lived negotiations of ordinary people. I am particularly interested in how these silences shaped and continue to shape future generations born after the breakup of Yugoslavia, the formation of national identities, and collective remembrance in the post-Yugoslav space.
During my fellowship, I intend to collaborate with INZ researchers whose expertise in socialist Yugoslav historiography, ethnography, and memory studies directly intersects with my project. More specifically, I would work with Dr. Nina Vodopivec, whose work focuses on collective memory and the history of socialist Yugoslavia.

Selected Publications:

Mujkanović, D., Zoletić, E., & Labonté, V. (2026). Slow Peacebuilding in Bosnia and Herzegovina Mobilizing Memory to Shift Out of Postwar Liminality. Southeastern Europe, 1(aop), 1-30.
Nguyen, V,T, Rivière, P, Ripolle, P, Barnier, J, Vuillemot, R, Ferrand, , Cohen-Boulakia, S, Ravaud, P, Boutron, I, The COVID-NMA Consortium Team (2021). Research response to COVID-19 needed better coordination and collaboration: a living mapping of registered trials. Journal of Clinical Epidemiology. Vol 130, 107-116

Coming out:

Zoletic, E (submitted August 2026; publication October 2026). From Bosnia to Gaza: Intergenerational Memory, Moral Obligation, and Transnational Activism. Journal for the Critique of Science, Imagination, and New Anthropology
Zoletic, E (submission September, 2026). Memory Activism and Intergenerational Transmission of Memories of the War in Bosnia and Its Aftermath. Journal of Comparative Southeast European Studies.
Poots, K., and Zoletic, E. (submitted July 2026). From Srebrenica to Gaza. Journal of Genocide Research.