Mišo Kapetanović

Mišo Kapetanović is a social science researcher working in cultural anthropology and European ethnography. He studied philosophy and sociology at the University of Banja Luka, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and global history and global studies at the University of Vienna and the University of Leipzig. He got his PhD in Balkan Studies from the University of Ljubljana. His work as a researcher started where his work as an activist stopped. His first experiences in the field are connected with human rights education and dealing with the past justice movements in Bosnian NGOs. But his experience as a researcher dates back to street community work with marginalized groups such as sex workers and men having sex with men, or civil victims of the 1990s wars. His academic engagement was an attempt to move away from and expand on these experiences, asking whom, when, and under what conditions he has a right to hope. His doctoral research followed the visual language of informal construction in post-war and post-socialist Bosnia and Herzegovina. Urban planners and professionals look down upon this type of contemporary vernacular architecture for its simplistic and dramatic visual style, but this type of construction has a key to recognizing the values its owners project into the public space. His current project, funded by the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Programme of the European Commission, explores regimes of gender and sexual diversity in the Western Balkans Mountains in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Mišo revises the existing knowledge about non-heteronormative practices beyond criminalization, placing the genesis of codified homophobia in a historical context that emerged with modernization.