Reclaiming Dita

In the 2010s, the “Dita” detergent factory, located in the city of Tuzla in northeast Bosnia-Herzegovina, became a site of unprecedented worker mobilization. Located in one of the largest industrial belts of this postsocialist and postwar country, Dita was a formerly successful, worker-managed factory that was nearly decimated by the processes of postwar privatization. Faced with a bankruptcy and seemingly inevitable liquidation of the firm’s assets, Dita’s labor union staged a muti-year struggle to protect the factory and safeguard the workers’ rights. Following the 2014 Bosnian Uprising, the workers were able to restart the production in the factory, paving the way for its subsequent reopening. The remarkable nature of this union-lead struggle attracted the attention of political anthropologists Larisa Kurtović and Andrew Gilbert, who were interested in why Dita workers succeeded where others had failed. Having joined forces with local activists, scholars, workers and a graphic artist, they embarked on an ethnographic exploration of local labor politics with the ultimate goal of producing a graphic ethnography. Join us for a talk with Dr. Larisa Kurtovic and Dr. Andrew Gilbert to learn more about their research as well as their efforts to challenge conventional forms of anthropological research through collaborative fieldwork and graphic-ethnographic representation.