This presentation will address a self-organised emergency schooling system during the 1990s war in an outlying apartment complex of Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina. All three schools in this settlement were destroyed early on, when this then new settlement was not only caught in the Serbian nationalist siege of the city, but also, additionally, cut off from the centre. In response, teachers organised educational activities in the lower parts of staircases, the safest places in the apartment blocks. Based on people's recollections and on war-time documents, the presentation will discuss how these haustorske škole ['staircase schools'] provided both primary and secondary education throughout the war years. Particular attention will be paid to bottom-up attempts to integrate these schooling practices in a 'system', and, in that way, to how they featured in people's yearnings for normal lives.
Lecture by Stef Jansen, University of Manchester
Schubertstr. 51 / HS 31.11