Danica Petrović | Place and Identity in Journalism in Former Yugoslavia

Historically, architecture served as an instrument for states to project power, progress, and unity while playing a significant role in the formation of national identity. In the former Yugoslavia, state architecture was employed to reinforce political narratives and cultivate a collective national consciousness. Journalists carefully analyzed these political dynamics and disseminated them to the broader public, while writing in the state-erected architecture that served as a symbolic representation that strengthened the regime’s ideology.

While most of the scholars researching journalistic spaces have concentrated on the Western Hemisphere, this research aims to fill this gap critically by shifting toward the East, exploring both the physical and symbolic environment that determined journalistic practices.

This project aims to examine the intersection between journalistic practices and the space where the news is being written by applying methodologies of spatial theories. By doing so, it will trace the evolution and transformation of these spaces and relate them to micro-narratives collected from interviews with former Yugoslav journalists. Their valuable insights will be situated into a broader context of historical development and interrepublic relations that will serve to track the dissemination of the news within the socialist state.

Furthermore, the project will create a topography of journalistic houses across former Yugoslav republics, identifying key case studies to reveal their hierarchy. By situating them within the context of Yugoslav socialist modernist architecture, the project will assess the architectural significance of these journalistic sites, aiming to highlight their historical and cultural value and finally contribute to their preservation.