Name and Surname
René Bogović
Affiliation
RECAS Fellow – University of Toronto
Contact email
rene.bogovic@mail.utoronto.ca
Short Biography
René Bogović is a recent PhD graduate in sociology from the University of Toronto. Building upon his background in documentary filmmaking, psychology, and languages, René crosses disciplinary boundaries by integrating historical analysis and participatory methods into his immersive ethnographies. A child of the Balkans educated across India, Italy, and Canada, he strives to establish theoretically and politically actionable transregional conversations. Connecting unlikely contexts such as the multiracial Afrikaans speech community in South Africa and the multilingual Northern Adriatic borderlands between Croatia, Slovenia, and Italy, his work centers language, multilingualism, and creolization as forces for inclusive group boundary-making.
Research abstract
The current project is a feasibility pilot addressing my proposition that the recent rise of new minority speakers of Italian and Slovene among majority youth on both sides of the former Yugoslav border disrupts and creolizes established hegemonic ethnolinguistic boundaries. Focusing on Croatia, I will conduct 3-5 in-depth interviews with recent graduates of the Italian High School in Rijeka with no Italophone family members to delineate how these youth construct, maintain, and disrupt ethnolinguistic boundaries. I will then examine the viability of these identitarian disruptions as blueprints for transethnic youth solidarity across Southeastern Europe, including their potential to address crises in governance and environmental degradation.