Cross Border Experience is organized by the Peace institute – Institute for Contemporary Social and Political Studies, Ljubljana, Slovenia along with the project partners Centre for Peace Studies, Zagreb, Croatia and Turkish Economic and Social Studies Foundation, Istanbul, Turkey.

Lana Zdravković
Project Coordinator

Lana Zdravković is a researcher, publicist, political activist and artist. She is a PhD candidate (The Policy of Emancipation – a Thought-Practice of the Militant Subject) of political philosophy at Institute of Philosophy at the Scientific Research Centre of the Slovene Academy of Sciences and Arts, Ljubljana, Slovenia. Fields of her academic interest include: nation-state, national identity, nationalism, sovereignty, citizenship, ideology, migrations, social inequality, political engagement, emancipator praxes. She works as researcher at the Peace Institute – Institute for Contemporary Social and Political Studies, Ljubljana. She occasionally publishes and collaborates within Slovene media: daily Večer and Delo, Dialogi – Magazine for Culture and Society, ČKZ – Journal for the Criticism of Science and New Anthropology, Borec – Journal for History, Anthropology and Literatures, Mladina, Tribuna, Radio Student Ljubljana, Radio Student Maribor, Media Watch journal where she is also a member of the editorial board. She is a performer and co-founder of Kitch – Institute of Art Production and Research, Ljubljana. Fields of her artistic interest include: neoliberalization and economization of the art, political performance, pornography and art kitsch and trash art.

Contact: lana.zdravkovic(at)mirovni-institut.si

Katja Kobolt
Project Assistant and Coordinator of Conference Arts Programme

Katja Kobolt is an independent feminist cultural producer, curator and theorist, living and working in Ljubljana, Slovenia and Munich, Germany. She holds a MA in comparative literature and journalism of the University from Ljubljana and a PhD in interdisciplinary literary studies from University Ludwig-Maximilian Munich (Frauen Schreiben Geschichte(n): Krieg, Geschlecht und Erinnern im ehemaligen Jugoslawien, 2009). Her articles and essays on literature and art have been published internationally. She has curated and produced various cultural projects in Ljubljana and Munich. Between 2000-2008 she was collaborating with Festival City of Women, where she finally worked as an artistic co-director. In 2010 she was a guest lecturer at the Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany (Department for Slavic Languages and Literature). She is a member of the curatorial group RED MIN(E)D, which is working on an open archive of feminist art of (post)Yugoslav space called Bring In Take Out – Living Archive.

Contact: kkobolt(at)gmail.com

Maja Ladić
Project Assistant

Maja Ladić graduated from Political Science – International Relations at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. During her studies she was very interested in international organizations and minorities (especially Roma), which is the topic she also graduated from. Maja is highly interested in topics like human rights, protection of minorities, ethnic discrimination, ethnic conflicts and social inclusion and she is planning to continue her studies in this direction. As a student she started working on different projects in the field of human rights at the Peace Institute and is now a coordinator of two development projects in Rwanda.

Contact: maja.ladic(at)mirovni-institut.si

Gordan Bosanac
Project Partner Coordinator

Gordan Bosanac works as a program coordinator at the Centre for Peace Studies, Zagreb, Croatia. His work is focused on peace building, human rights policies and public policies with focus on security, combating discrimination and development of civil society. Gordan is teaching on the subject of human security at Peace Studies in Zagreb and he is also a program collaborator of Queer Zagreb working on researches and advocacy in the field of LGBT policies.

Contact: gordan.bosanac(at)cms.hr

Mirjana Mikić Zeitoun
Project Partner Coordinator

Mirjana Mikić Zeitoun is an activist working at the Centre for Peace Studies, Zagreb, Croatia, where she is also a lecturer. Her work is aimed at improving interethnic relations through intercultural dialogue, affirmation of minority rights and directly helping the socially excluded: mostly in the field of Western Slavonia, where the roots of her own ancestry lie, and Zadar hinterland (both in Croatia). She would like to be counted as a brave person: lots of things happened to her, most of them nice and she regrets nothing. She studied sociology and ethnology at the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb.

Contact: mirjanamikic(at)gmail.com

Dilek Kurban
Project Partner Coordinator

Dilek Kurban is the Director of the Democratization Program at the Turkish Economic and Social Studies Foundation (TESEV), Istanbul. She received her bachelor’s degree in Political Science and International Relations from Boğaziçi University, Istanbul. She received her Master’s in International Affairs (MIA) in human rights from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, and her Juris Doctor (JD) degree from Columbia Law School, USA. She worked as an Associate Political Affairs Officer at the Security Council Affairs Division of the United Nations Department of Political Affairs in New York, USA. Kurban is a columnist for the Turkish national daily Radikal and a page editor for Agos, a Turkish-Armenian bilingual weekly. She is a founding member of the Diyarbakır Institute for Political and Social Research (DISA) and an adjunct professor of law at the Political Science Department of Boğaziçi University. She has published in the areas of minority and human rights in Turkey, internal displacement in Turkey and European minority and human rights law.

Contact: dilekkurban(at)tesev.org.tr

Esra Bakkalbaşıoğlu
Project Partner Coordinator

Esra Bakkalbaşıoğlu is currently the Program Assistant of the Democratization Program at the Turkish Economic and Social Studies Foundation (TESEV), Istanbul. She is coordinating studies on Kurdish Question and Media and Democracy. Besides, she is working as Coordinator at Documentarist: Istanbul Documentary Festival. She obtained both her BA and MA degrees in Political Science and International Relations from Boğaziçi University, Istanbul. Her Master thesis was on nonviolent anti-West Bank Wall movements and the way these movements affected the politics in the region. Her general fields of interests are Politics in the Middle East, Peace and Conflict Studies and Nonviolent Social Movements Studies. On September 2011, she has started to pursue her PhD in the Interdisciplinary PhD Program on Near and Middle Eastern Studies at University of Washington, in Seattle, USA.

Contact: esra.bakkalbasi(at)tesev.org.tr

Ana Frank
Expert Advisor

Ana Frank is a young research fellow at the Peace Institute, Ljubljana, Slovenia. She graduated from Political Sciences – International Relations in 2004 at the University of Ljubljana. Her main topics of research are gender and religious studies, with special focus on Islam. She acquired her MA in 2010 in Anthropology of Gender at the Graduate School of Humanities (ISH), Ljubljana. From 2005 to 2007 Ana was a visiting research student at the University of Istanbul and University of Ankara learning Turkish language and doing research on religious and secular relations in Turkey with focus on gender discrimination. In 2008 and 2009 she complemented her studies at the Women’s Studies Centre, University of Lodz in Poland and at the Florida International University in USA. She worked as a researcher at the European project Quing: Qualıty in Gender + Equality Policies. Currently she is writing her PhD on the Influence of Europeanization on Religious Discourses in Gender Equality Policies in Turkey at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana.

Contact: ana.frank(at)mirovni-institut.si

Veronika Bajt
Expert Advisor

Veronika Bajt holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Bristol, UK. She works as a researcher at the Peace Institute in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Her field of research includes migration, gender, nationalism and national identity construction; she has published on topics of migration, gender and labour market, nationalism, Muslims’ religious discrimination, national identity construction and practices of Othering in media discourse. She is also a visiting lecturer at the International University Institute for European Studies in Gorizia, Italy and taught at the Sociology Department of the Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic.

Contact: veronika.bajt(at)mirovni-institut.si

Martin Jaigma
Expert Advisor

Martin Jaigma, PhD in Anthropology of Everyday Life, Institute of the Humanities (ISH), Ljubljana, Slovenia, is currently a researcher at the Peace Institute in Ljubljana. His main research themes include the history of East Central Europe, European Jewish history, ethnic relations and nationalism. He has been a recipient of the Rothschild Foundation Postdoctoral Grants Programme, Student’s Scholarship Programme by the Centre for Studies of the Culture and History of East European Jews in Vilnius, Soros Supplementary Grants Program and Jewish Studies Research Support Grant by the American Jewish Committee. He received his MA degree in history from the Central European University, Budapest, Hungary and BA degree in history from the University of Tartu, Estonia. Martin Jaigma is the author of two monographs, several articles on the aspects of European history and minority issues. Martin Jaigma has previously worked at the Estonian Historical Archives and Estonian History Museum in Tallinn.

Contact: martin.jaigma(at)mirovni-institut.si