Research Center for Cultures, Politics and Identities (IPAK.Center) is founded as a result of long-term cooperation of students, scholars, activists, artists and other political friends from Serbia, SEE, Europe, and from all around the world.
Situated at the Faculty for Media and Communications in Belgrade the Center is involved in cultural and political research studies devoted to reflecting on and questioning of rather complex issues of identity formation, difference, otherness and diversity, cultural, political and activist doing, as well as with shared researches deployed locally, regionally and globally.
Mission of the Center is to encourage, spread and advance critical thinking and to initiate innovative discourses, to develop trans-disciplinary knowledge and contemporary research. By participating in socially and politically engaged cultural production the Center will provide conditions for improvement of democratic principles of the social life and academic disciplines that are not based on hierarchy and hegemony. Main goal of the Center is to promote multiple identities, minority thinking and different forms of socio-political life.
IPAK CENTER supports critical, non-normative education, research and activist agency that questions embedded and stable notions of identity, as well as predominant discourses in categorizing and creating meaning and valuing of individuals, groups and communities.
Gabrijela Ivanov was born in Zadar in 1976. She is a computer engineer who advocates for strategic, socially useful utilization of information-communication technologies. She is an idealist who works in the field of gender equality and media culture. She believes in the importance of personal revolutions and the power of their synergy. She works and lives in Zagreb, and is the founder and coordinator of the Space of Gender and Media Culture K-Zone association, and main editor of the Vox Feminae.net portal.
Hana Grgić was born in 1988 in Požega, Croatia. Graduated journalism at the Faculty of Political Science at the University of Zagreb and finished educational programme at the Center for Women's Studies in Zagreb. Since the summer of 2012 she is one of editors at Libela - a feminist portal about gender, sex and democracy issues. Also, she currently works as a project coordinator at the Ombudsperson for Gender Equality. Member of several feminist and activist groups and initiatives. Lives in Zagreb.
Svjetlana Knežević has an M.A. in journalism from the Faculty of Political Sciences in Zagreb. She is a member of the editorial staff at Libela – a portal on gender, sex and democracy. She is a longtime editor and radio show host – presenting topics pertaining to human rights and activism – on the Expanding the Area of Struggle show on Radio Student. She coordinates the Ready to Work initiative which works on the status of young women in the work force. Svjetlana mostly focuses on issues pertaining to gender, class and activism.
Tiiiit! Inc. is a little flame of excitement shared by three girls from Skopje who want to enjoy the city they live in. Prvo pa Žensko (First Child Is a Girl) is their most precious brainchild and a unique (and one of a kind in Macedonia) festival with the goal of rethinking the meaning of 8th of March, the International Women’s Day, by placing it in a current context. By opening new space for creative expression, opportunities for networking and exchange of knowledge, the Festival creates a new space to question, rethink and advocate for the improvement of the position of women in our contemporary societies. They are driving through on their new project Intimate Maps of Female Cities - a radio show, broadcasted live from a moving car, set to happen in all Ex-Yugoslavian capitals. They have already mapped Skopje and Zagreb... Belgrade seems to be a great next stop.
Jelena Višnjić, MPhil, Gender Studies (University of Belgrade). Currently, she is working on her PhD thesis at the University in Novi Sad. She is one of the founders and editors of the festival of feminist culture and action BeFem, a lecturer and associate at the Centre for Women’s Studies, Belgrade and a feminist activist. Her main areas of research are gender studies, media studies, culture studies, and the anthropology of popular culture.
Lauren Berlant is the George M. Pullman Distinguished Service Professor at the Department of English, University of Chicago, where she has been teaching since 1984. Berlant received her Ph.D. from Cornell University. She writes and teaches on issues of intimacy and belonging in popular culture, in relation to the history and fantasy of citizenship. She writes on public spheres as affect worlds, where affect and emotion lead the way for belonging ahead of the modes of rational or deliberative thought. These attach strangers to each other and shape the terms of the state-civil society relation. She is the author of, among other books, Sex, or the Unbearable (with Lee Edelman), Cruel Optimism, and The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture. 
Luciana Parisi is Reader in Cultural Theory, Chair of the PhD programme at the Centre for Cultural Studies, and co-director of the Digital Culture Unit, Goldsmiths University of London. Her research draws on continental philosophy to investigate ontological and epistemological transformations driven by the function of technology in culture, aesthetics and politics. Her writing aims to develop a naturalistic approach to thinking and technology. She is interested in cybernetics, information theory and computation, complexity and evolutionary theories. Her writing addresses the technocapitalist investment in artificial intelligence, biotechnology, nanotechnology. She has written extensively within the field of Media Philosophy and Computational Design. In 2004, she published Abstract Sex: Philosophy, Biotechnology and the Mutations of Desire (Continuum Press). In 2013, she published Contagious Architecture. Computation, Aesthetics and Space (MIT Press). She is currently researching the history of automation and the philosophical consequences of logical thinking in machines.
Laima Kreivytė is a lecturer at the Vilnius Academy of Arts and European Humanities University. She introduced a course on queer theory and art at Vilnius University’s Gender Studies Centre in 2008. Kreivytė was a researcher from Lithuania for Gender Check. Femininity and Masculinity in Eastern European Art at the MUMOK in Vienna (2009-2010). Exhibitions she has curated include From Dusk Till Dawn: 20 Years of LGBT Freedom in Lithuania (Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius, 2013), Lithuanian pavilion in 53rd Venice Biennale (2009), Baltic Mythologies in Prague Biennale III (2007). Kreivytė participates in feminist art and research projects and works with the artist collective Cooltūristės.
Kolozova is director and senior researcher at the Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities - Skopje (
Patricia Ticineto Clough is professor of Sociology and Women’s Studies at the Graduate Center and Queens College of the City University of New York. Among her publication is Autoaffection: Unconscious Thought in the Age of Teletechnology and as editor The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social, and Beyond Biopolitic: Essays in the Governance of Life and Death. Most recently published is The User Unconscious: Affect, Media and Measure. Clough’s work has drawn on theoretical traditions concerned with technology, affect, unconscious processes, political economy and experimental methods of research and presentation. She also is a psychoanalyst practicing in NYC. 
Patricia MacCormack is Professor of Continental Philosophy at Anglia Ruskin University. She is the author of Cinesexuality (2008) and Posthuman Ethics (2012), the editor of The Animal Catalyst: Toward Ahuman Theory (2014) and the co-editor of Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Cinema (2008), Deleuze and the Animal (2017) and Ecosophical Aesthetics (2018). She publishes extensively in the posthuman, queer theory, animal studies, horror film, and Continental Philosophy.
Iris van der Tuin is currently Associate Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, Faculty of Humanities, Utrecht University. She is Director of the School of Liberal Arts and a member of the research group ‘Transmission in Motion’ of the Institute of Cultural Inquiry (ICON). Van der Tuin is PI of the COST Action New Materialism: Networking European Scholarship on ‘How Matter Comes to Matter’ (2014-2018). Some relevant book publications are: Nature (2016) for the Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks on Patricia Ticineto Clough is professor of Sociology and Women’s Studies at the Graduate Center
and Queens College of the City University of New York. Among her publications is Gender, Generational Feminism: New Materialist Introduction to a Generative Approach (2015) and New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies (2012; written with Rick Dolphijn).
Jelena Petrović is a feminist scholar, art theorist and curator. (Co)author of texts, events, exhibitions and projects related to (post)Yugoslav subjects – particularly with regard to the (post)Yugoslav history, art-theory and feminism. She completed her PhD at ISH Ljubljana Graduate School of Humanities (2009). From 2008 to 2014 she was an active member of the new Yugoslav art-theory group Grupa Spomenik (The Monument Group). Appointed as the Endowed Professor for Central and South Eastern European Art Histories at Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (2015-2017). As an initiator of the course: Living Archive: Feminist Curatorship and Contemporary Artistic Practices she was teaching at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design, University of Ljubljana (2014-2017). Since 2011, co-founder and member of
the feminist curatorial collective 
Rok Vevar is Slovene publicist, critic and theatre director. Rok Vevar has studied comparative literature at the Faculty of Arts and theatre directing at the Academy for Theatre, Radio, Film and TV in Ljubljana. He is a publicist and critic writing for DELO Daily, VECER Daily, Radio Student, MASKA, Lutka, Frakcija; contributing for Catalogue of Slovene National Theatre Drama Ljubljana, Catalogue of City Theatre of Ljubljana; editor of various Festival Catalogues, etc.). He was a member of the editorial board of Maska magazine (1999-2006). He is also a theatre director and has been involved in various projects as a dramaturge (Dance Theatre Ljubljana), an assistant director at Slovene TV (documentary programme), author of lyrics for a cinematic band Pavel Vlasov Sextet (Slovene Cinematheque) etc. With Simona Semenič he is co-author of three theatre & dance pieces: A fistful of Empty Hands (2001), Solo No Peak (2003), Chartography of a Feature-length Slide Show (2005). In 2005 Rok was a co-selector for Gibanica/Moving Cake, Slovene Dance festival and an executive producer and author of Slovene Contemporary Theatre and Dance Archive Project. Between 2012-15 assistant professor at Academy for Theatre, Radio, Film and TV, Ljubljana, Slovenia, and taughed Contemporary Dance History, Dramaturgy and Analysis of c.d. at Academy for Dance in Ljubljana. He is a founder of The Temporary Slovene Dance Archives Works and lives in Ljubljana. 
Ann Cvetkovich is Ellen Clayton Garwood Centennial Professor of English and Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism (Rutgers, 1992); An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Duke, 2003); and Depression: A Public Feeling (Duke, 2012). She is writing a book about the current state of LGBTQ archives and the creative use of them by artists to produce counter-archives and interventions in public history. Visit her website at: 
Lisa Blackman is a professor in the Department of Media and Communications at Goldsmiths, University of London. She works at the intersection of body studies and media and cultural theory and is particularly interested in subjectivity, affect, the body and embodiment. She has published four books in this area. The most recent is Immaterial Bodies: Affect, Embodiment, Mediation (Sage, 2012). Her work in the area of embodiment and voice hearing has been recognized and commended for its innovative approach to mental health research and it has been acclaimed by the Hearing Voices Network, Intervoice, and has been taken up in professional psychiatric contexts. She has just completed a manuscript Haunted Data: Transmedia, Affect, Weird Science and Archives of the Future. She is the Editor of the journal Body & Society (Sage) and Co-Editor with Valerie Walkerdine of the journal Subjectivity (Palgrave). She is currently the co-Head of the Department of Media and Communications, Goldsmiths, University of London.
Boryana Rossa lives and works in Sofia and New York in the cross-section of performance art, film, photography, media arts and curating. She is assistant professor at the Transmedia department in Syracuse University, teaching transmedia, film theory, and performance art. Recently Rossa finished her dissertation titled Post-Cold War Gender Performances. Cross-cultural Examination of Gender Performances viewed through Film Re-enactments. at Rensselaer Institute, Troy, New York. Her works have been shown at the Museum of Modern Art (MUMOK), Vienna; Brooklyn Museum, New York; National Art Gallery Zacheta, Warsaw; 1st and 2nd Moscow Biennial; 1st Balkan Biennial, Thessaloniki; Coreana Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul, etc. In 2004 together with Oleg Mavromatti she established the art-collective ULTRAFUTURO. The group works in the field of performance, investigating the influence of science and technology in society. She is also one of the directors of Sofia Queer Forum.
Katerina Kolozova, PhD, is the director of the Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities - Skopje, Macedonia and a professor of gender studies at the University American College - Skopje. She is also visiting professor at several universities in the region of Southeast Europe. In 2009, Kolozova was a visiting scholar in the Department of Rhetoric (Program of Critical Theory) at the University of California-Berkeley. She is the author of Cut of the Real: Subjectivity in Poststructuralist Philosophy (Columbia University Press, 2014), Toward a Radical Metaphysics of Socialism: Marx and Laruelle (Punctum Books, 2015) and co-editor of After the "Speculative Turn": Realism, Philosophy and Feminism (Punctum Books, 2016).
Luce Irigaray (PhD, Linguistics, Philosophy, University of Paris VII, certification, Ecole Freudienne de Paris) is Director of Research in Philosophy at the Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique. Originally a student of the famous analyst Jacques Lacan, Irigaray's departure from Lacan in Speculum of the Other Woman, where she critiques the exclusion of women from both philosophy and psychoanalytic theory, earned her recognition as a leading feminist theorist and continental philosopher. Her subsequent texts provide a comprehensive analysis and critique of the exclusion of women from the history of philosophy, psychoanalytic theory and structural linguistics. In addition to establishing this critique, Irigaray offers suggestions for altering the situation of women in Western culture. Mimesis, strategic essentialism, utopian ideals, and employing novel language, are but some of the methods central to changing contemporary culture. Irigaray's analysis of women's exclusion from culture and her use of strategic essentialism have been enormously influential in contemporary feminist theory. Irigaray's work extends beyond theory into practice. Irigaray has been actively engaged in the feminist movement in Italy. Her contributions to feminist theory and continental philosophy are many and her complete works present her readers with a rewarding challenge to traditional conceptions of gender, self, and body. Many of her works have been translated into English, including most notably An Ethics of Sexual Difference (Cornell, 1993), Between East and West (Columbia, 2002), Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche (Columbia, 1991), Sexes and Genealogies (Columbia, 1993), Speculum of the Other Woman (Cornell, 1985), and This Sex Which Is Not One (Cornell, 1985).
Karen Barad is Professor of Feminist Studies, Philosophy, and History of Consciousness at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Barad's Ph.D. is in theoretical particle physics and quantum field theory. Barad held a tenured appointment in a physics department before moving into more interdisciplinary spaces. Barad is the author of Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Duke University Press, 2007) and numerous articles in the fields of physics, philosophy, science studies, poststructuralist theory, and feminist theory. Barad's research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Hughes Foundation, the Irvine Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Barad is the Co-Director of the Science & Justice Graduate Training Program at UCSC. Barad received an honorary doctorate from Gothenburg University in 2016, and is on the faculty of the European Graduate School. 
Tiziana Terranova is Associate Professor in Cultural Studies and Digital Media at the University of Naples L'Orientale, where she is a member of the Centre for Postcolonial and Gender Studies and co-founder of the 
Svetlana Slapšak is a retired professor of the anthropology of the ancient world, anthropology of gender, and Balkanology. She was dean of the postgraduate Institut studiorum humanitatis (ISH) in Ljubljana. She has taught at universities in Europe and North America. She has published a large number of studies, essays, and prose works. Biblioteka XX. vek has published other works by her: Female idols of the Twentieth Century (2001), Female idols of the ancient world (2006), Ancient mythurgy – Women (2013), Flying pillau (2014) and Kupusara (2016). She has received the “Miloš Crnjanski” award (1990), the award of the American PEN Centre (1993), the award of the International Helsinki Committee (2000), the “Helen” award (2001), the “Mirko Kovač” award (2016), the Golden Sunflower award (2017), and the MIRA prize of the Women’s Section of the Slovenian PEN Centre (2017).
Jelisaveta Blagojević teaches at the Faculty of Media and Communications, Singidunum University (Belgrade) and has served as the university’s dean of academic affairs since 2006. She has also worked at the Belgrade Women’s Studies and Gender Research Center as a coordinator and lecturer since 2001. Since 2003 she has been a visiting lecturer at the Gender and Politics Program at the Political Science Faculty, Belgrade University. She has taught as a visiting lecturer at universities across Southeast Europe. 
Apr 28,19:30, 2015
Within the context of its queer reconceptualization, desire can be conceived as a capacity to go beyond what is thinkable. On the one hand, there is traditional “western” model of thinking understood as the rational/dialectical thought which, in its circular manner, can onl...
Ovaj motiv koji se dakle odnosi na kritiku savremenih oblika fašizacije društva pokušavam da prenesem na vreme u kome mi živimo i na ovaj ovdašnji kontekst. Teza je da se fašizam ili fašizmi dosta dobro ’drže’ u vremenu u kome živimo i važno je, iako ne i dovoljno, da se pritom u...