Registration REQUIRED by 12pm on April 24, 2026 in order to attend this event.
Please join the Njegoš Endowment for Serbian Language and Culture, the East Central European Center, and the Harriman Institute for a lecture by Katja Kobolt. Moderated by Aleksandar Bošković.
After the devastation of the Second World War and the sustained struggle for freedom during the National Liberation War in Yugoslavia (1941–45), the concept of childhood as a distinct stage of life assumed a decisive role in the reconstruction and development of postwar society, both domestically and internationally. The “century of the child” coincided with the “century of the book”: books, magazines, newspapers, and their illustrations accompanied children—who constituted nearly half of the population—as they grew up. Through words, sound, image, puppetry, and movement, creative practices for (and with) children opened the doors of the art world to those previously largely excluded, particularly women and children from the broader population.
This lecture reflects on the feminized practice of art for children through the lens of social reproduction. Focusing primarily on socialist Yugoslavia, it examines the interrelations among key dimensions of social reproduction—care, gender, class, upbringing, education, and the formation of new productive and reproductive conditions, institutions, and social relations—and explores how these processes intersected with artistic production.
Dr. Katja Kobolt is a researcher in literary, cultural, and memory studies, specializing in feminist approaches to cultural and artistic production and children’s literature. Her work draws on extensive cross-sector experience in curating, art education, and artistic research, and engages participatory and childism-oriented methodologies alongside approaches from cultural anthropology and multimodal, performative research. She is currently a Marie Skłodowska-Curie and NextGenerationEU Fellow at the Institute of Culture and Memory Studies, ZRC SAZU in Ljubljana (2021–2026), where her research focuses on feminized cultural production for children, with particular emphasis on illustration and literature in socialist contexts. As part of this project, she curates a digital collection of women illustrators from the socialist period. Dr. Kobolt is a member of the International Research Society for Children’s Literature and the working group Das Kinderliterarische Kolloquium (KLK), and serves on the editorial boards of Membrana: Journal of Photography, Theory and Visual Culture and Historijska traganja / Historical Searches. She has also taught at the Academy of Arts, University of Nova Gorica.
Illustration by Lidije Osterc for Bibe v avtošoli (Creepy-crawly at the Driving School) by Mira Voglar, 1983, DDU Univerzum. With the permission from the heirs of Lidija Osterc, represented by the Copyright Agency of Slovenia.
Portrait of Katja Kobolt by Vesna Bukovec, from the series “Why am I a feminist?” for Feminizem, umetnost, literatura (Feminism, art, literature), Časopis za kritiko znanosti, LI/289, 2023. With the permission of Vesna Bukovec.
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