Zorica Siročić
UGO business card: LINK
Zorica Sirocic has been Postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Sociology at the University of Graz since 2021. Previously, she was a postdoctoral fellow of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (2020/2021). As a political scientist and sociologist, she focuses on contemporary gender contestations (left and right of the political spectrum), social movements and critical event studies.
Her monograph, Festivals as Reparative Gender Politics: Millennial Feminism in Southeastern Europe (Routledge, 2023; AWSS Honorable Mention 2024) challenges conventional assumptions of politics as a primarily antagonistic activity, arguing instead how millennial feminist and queer activist festivals can be interpreted as a form of “reparative” politics. Drawing on rich data from multi-sited ethnography, including interviews, participant observation, and performances, this book illustrates how political action can be reparative, creative, and playful, providing activists and audiences with a sense of belonging and safety to express themselves and to viscerally experience the conditions of life they are advocating for.
Sirocic has received several awards for her research on gender politics in Southeastern Europe, including the Gabriele Possanner Award for Excellence in Gender Research from the Austrian Ministry of Science, Education and Research (2019) and the Johanna Dohnal Fellowship from the Johanna Dohnal Archive (2015).
Sirocic teaches BA and MA courses in political sociology, sociology of social movements and sociology of gender. She is co-speaker of a university-wide research cluster, Media and Social Movements, which provides a forum and network for interdisciplinary scholars interested in the complex dynamics between these two fields.
Current habilitation project
Sirocic’s habilitation project explores innovative and atypical aspects of political action as demonstrated by doing politics in overlooked contexts, modes and tactics. In particular, she examines the ways in which activists creatively play with, invent, imitate, or diffuse strategies, tactics and frames of political action, and how they connect these aspects with the affective charge that is capable of surprising their opponents and audiences. In this project, Sirocic uses a conceptual framework that draws on otherwise disparate strands of social science research, including political sociology, the sociology of creativity and the sociology of gender. Combined with an empirical focus that includes under-researched activist forms of post-socialist gender politics such as third-wave feminism, postfeminism and antigenderism, Sirocic’s habilitation project promises to offer original analytical concepts for understanding contemporary social and political phenomena (e.g. “contentious gender politics”, “temporal activist repertoires”, see Publications). As one part of her habilitation project, she is currently editing the special issue Creative Protest: Creativity, Politics & Social Movements, and is preparing a manuscript examining why and when anti-gender movements fail.
Selected publications:
Book:
Siročić, Zorica. 2023. Festivals as Reparative Gender Politics: Millennial Feminism in Southeastern Europe. New York: Routledge, series Gender and Comparative Politics (AWSS, 2024, Honorable Mention, in the competition for the Best Book in Slavic Women’s and Gender Studies).
Articles and book chapters:
Siročić, Zorica. 2025. Anger in festivals: Contradiction in terms or a desirable part of the program?, Emotion, Space and Society 55, doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2025.101087
Siročić, Zorica. 2025. When and why do anti-gender movements fail?, European Journal of Politics and Gender (published online ahead of print 2025). Retrieved Jan 13, 2025. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1332/25151088Y2024D000000068
Siročić, Zorica. 2024. Multi-sited research as a creative methodology for critical event studies, in Platt, L. et al. (eds.), Creative Research Methods for Critical Event Studies. Routledge. DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781032686424-3
Siročić, Zorica. 2024. Temporal repertoires in contemporary activism: The cases of Fridays for Future, 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence and ‘It’s Thursday Again!’, European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology, DOI: 10.1080/23254823.2024.2335159
Anna Lavizzari & Zorica Siročić. 2022. Contentious gender politics in Italy and Croatia: diffusion of transnational anti-gender movements to national contexts, Social Movement Studies, DOI: 10.1080/14742837.2022.2052836
Der Beitrag wurde auf die Shortlist für den „2022 Britta Baumgarten Memorial Prize“ gesetzt.