In honor of Zagorka Golubović, one of the founders of social anthropology in Serbia, the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory has established the annual Zagorka Golubović Early Career Engaged Research Award.

The award will be given for the engaged scientific work of junior researchers: master’s degree students, doctoral students, or those who have obtained their doctoral degree within the past five years. The award is intended for a paper published in the past year in Serbian (Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin) or English in a scientific journal or in an edited volume. Papers which approach regional or wider social problems in an engaged way will be taken into consideration. The papers should be original scientific articles in the social sciences and the humanities. Both empirical and purely theoretical research works are permitted.

The research field of engagement studies developed by the Institute of Philosophy and Social Theory defines engagement as a reflective and active attitude of an individual or a group towards certain institutionalized or culturally dominant norms, and as an active attitude towards intervention into the established order.

Submitted papers should:

  • Function as an invitation to others to join the process of reflecting and intervening into social reality – to encourage thinking and acting by focusing on themes and methods that challenge dominant narratives;
  • Contain a critical, that is, an engaged aim – an effort to translate scientific insights into guidelines for acting (i.e., to be operationalized); that is, to offer a thought that wants to be an action;
  • Strive to include a larger number of agents into thinking about and acting against institutional reality which requires a line of argument which is intelligible to a wider audience but which will not lose the rigor and the quality of scientific insights. Thus, the papers should be written using an engaging language.

The best paper, selected by members of the scientific jury, will be re-published in one of the journals of the Institute: Philosophy and Society or The Critique. The author of the winning paper will also be provided with a monetary prize.

Detailed guidelines for application will be provided in a public call for papers which will be announced by the end of May.

Winners

The winner of the “Zagorka Golubović” Award for 2021 is Lara Končar, a doctoral student at the Faculty of Political Sciences in Belgrade, for her paper “On the Position and Experiences of Seasonal Agricultural Workers in Modern Serbia. Can We Talk about the Elements of Structural Violence” which has been published in Antropologija 20, vol.: 3.

The award-winning paper represents a high-quality original scientific text which examines the existence of structural, institutional and other forms of violence as well as the exclusion of women from the labor sphere with a focus on the sphere of seasonal agricultural work.

The winner of the “Zagorka Golubović” Award for 2022 is Bojan Baća, a Marie Skłodovska-Curie scholar at the University of Gothenburg and a research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies of the University of Montenegro, for his paper “Practice Theory and Postsocialist Civil Society: Towards a New Analytical Framework” which has been published in International Political Sociology 16, vol.: 1.

The award-winning paper represents a synthesis of theoretical and empirical findings about civil society, social movements, protest politics, activist citizenship, and unconventional political participation in Central and Eastern Europe.

The winner of the “Zagorka Golubović” award for 2023 is Violeta Tadić, a research assistant at the Institute for Pedagogical Research in Belgrade, for her paper “On Approaches to Defining and Operationalizing the Concept of Safety in the School” which has been published in Nastava i vaspitanje 71, vol.: 2.

The award-winning paper treats the problem of school security as a complex social problem. The author seeks to identify the basic conceptual as well as operational dilemmas and problems by critically considering different approaches, and points out the importance of the term and its adequate definition due to the implications for further research and the creation of school policy.