An informal event dedicated to students asking questions and discussing with the session panellists and other participants in a relaxed setting. For the full session program click here

In the United States, students are taught forms and formulas for academic writing early on, usually from six grade through high school. As a result, when they get to university, their professors have to disabuse them of the notion that there is any “one size fits all” form of essay writing and instead begin to introduce them to the specific questions, concerns, and styles of different academic disciplines.

Thus, at university, students already trained to think about writing formally eventually learn that historians don’t write like literary critics, and that philosophers or political scientists don’t write like any of the others; moreover, they may learn that some disciplines, such as comparative literature or anthropology, borrow from many other fields, availing themselves of the tools of many different trades.

What is less rarely taught is the only thing that matters. As the linguist Bill Labov noted long ago, the one question every story must answer is “So what?” In this workshop, we’ll work on examples and exercises that emphasize how academic writing is no different in this respect: it too must engage with its audience and interlocutors, and it does so based on concerns and conversations that authors are already engaged in.

When it comes to writing in (and about) troubled times like ours, such concerns become even more important. In such times, rife with conflict, we need to write, not so much to say what we think, but instead to discover what we think.

Translation involves carrying words over from one language into another. Words come with all sorts of baggage: conceptual, literary, symbolic, political, historical, cultural, etc. Proverbially, some of it gets lost in translation. But as long as the meaning is conveyed across more or less unscathed, we consider the translation to be successful. In terms of translation, think of the world as one big busy and often poorly managed airport with words travelling back and forth with all their baggage, getting lost, being found, going off to explore the world and coming back home richer for the experience.

Thus conceived, translation is not a one-way journey with a beginning and an end. There is no stasis in the world of translation, everything is in constant flux. Words and their meanings, concepts and their implications, everything from whole works of literature and entire literary traditions down to the smallest quirks of local custom and poetic license keeps travelling back and forth and becoming transformed in the process. The result is all that we share.

The workshop will focus on moving cultural content between languages through translation and how this is complicated when such content is already familiar in the target language. Participants will be invited to work on sample passages and offer their own thoughts and insights. Specifically, we will look at Tabish Khair’s novel Just Another Jihadi Jane, translated into Bosnian as Čudna jada od džihada by Ulvija Tanović, and explore the challenges of translating fictional characters struggling to find their place in the world into a language where they already feel at home.

The 2023 Bosnia & Herzegovina three-minute thesis (3MT) competition challenges students (Ph.D., Masters & Undergraduate) to communicate the significance of their research projects to a non-specialist audience in just three minutes and compete for over 20 000 BAM prize money. The primary objective of the 2023 3MT initiative is to bring talented young undergraduate, masters & Ph.D. researchers with Bosnia & Herzegovina origins together under one umbrella with Bosnia & Herzegovina origins and give them a platform to:

1. Engage with each other and a greater researcher community
2. Build a community of young researchers and lay the foundations for future collaboration
3. Disseminate important research information to the general public
4. Build partnerships and friendships between collaborating organisations
5. Showcase the global research excellence of Bosnia & Herzegovina
6. Boost personal careers by gaining visibility and improving communications skills
7. Connect prospective students with world class researchers of Bosnia & Herzegovina origins