PROP was established in 2016 in answer to the need for cooperation between scholars from different academic institutions. At the beginning was an idea of Dominika Kaniecka from the Jagiellonian University and Maciej Falski from the University of Warsaw to do something together. We decided to try an informal way of cooperating and organized at first a seminar, which we called the ‘Croatian Seminar,’ asking our scholars-and-friends to join the idea. Our first project was focused on the notion of the performative, political, and meaningful (‘Performativno, političko, značenjsko’). After four successful meetings, when we realized that it was going in the right direction, we decided to transform our informal project into formal group, calling it Post-Yugoslav Area Research Center, established by the Institute of Western and Southern Slavic Studies.

We love doing research together, as a team. Our work is based on discussion, giving us an opportunity to share ideas and achieve in that way a more adequate conclusions to the common research. We try to accomplish that goal, joining views and experience of different fields in human and social sciences: sociology, political science, philology, culture studies, and history. Our common work is supposed, thus, to be an effect of a real multidisciplinary approach.

Currently we work on a set of papers, finishing the first project, and launch another, concerning ‘practicing of the community,’ i.e. ways in which people in the post-Yugoslav area try to put in practice their belongingness to different communities, situated somewhere in-between the individual and the national, with a special interest for that phenomenon in the time of post-socialist transformation.