IMMERSE · The Inhospitable (Mother)land: Sedimented Monsters, Embedded Exposure, and Vernacular Healing in Post-Genocide Bosnia

Lines connect the coordinator with its partners. CORDIS does not always give exact coordinates for projects before 2014. These points are placed at city or country level.

Project objective

IMMERSE investigates how communities in post-war Bosnia live with and respond to landscapes altered by genocide. Soils marked by mass graves, alleged wartime toxins, and ecological degradation remain largely absent from scientific monitoring, yet they persist in community memory, embodied health concerns, and vernacular practices of care. By introducing the concept of embedded exposure, the project traces how war residues are absorbed into soil and water systems, circulate through food and bodies, and are transmitted as intergenerational concerns of illness, vulnerability, and risk.A further innovation lies in method: in the absence of systematic testing or forensic data, IMMERSE develops an epistemology grounded in community memories, sensory cues, and vernacular interpretations—treating them as evidence rather than anecdote. This reframes how toxic legacies can be identified and understood when conventional datasets do not exist.Through multimodal ethnography—combining fieldwork, piloting participatory ethnographic film, sensory mapping, and archival research—IMMERSE reframes contaminated landscapes not only as sites of loss but also as terrains of resilience, ritual, and re-imagined belonging. Hosted at Freie Universität Berlin with fieldwork in Bosnia, the project strengthens collaborations between European universities, Bosnian institutions, and NGOs, while amplifying community voices in debates on environmental justice.IMMERSE contributes to anthropology, political ecology, and memory studies by revealing how violence becomes sedimented in the environment and inherited through everyday exchanges between land and body. It also provides policy-relevant tools for addressing environmental health risks in post-conflict societies, offering transferable insights across European contexts of toxic legacies and divided ecologies.

Original text from CORDIS.

Participants

• FREIE UNIVERSITAET BERLIN · BerlinCoordinatorGermany
• JAVNA USTANOVA UNIVERZITET U TUZLI UNIVERSITAS STUDIORUM TUZLAENSIS · TuzlaCity levelBosnia & Herzegovina

Links

• View on CORDIS
• DOI: 10.3030/101280338