Slavia Meridionalis 28

Thematic Issue: Youth Movements, Subcultures and (New) Media
Editors: Stanislava Barać and Katarzyna Taczyńska

The initial motivation for a thematic issue of Slavia Meridionalis, entitled “Youth Movements, Subcultures and (New) Media”, arose from social mobilisation in Serbia during 2024–2025, and its impact on cultural and academic fields. In particular, the unexpected surge of new student magazines related to the widespread protests proved especially interesting. At the same time, we believe that the student protests and the accompanying cultural and literary production invite questions about broader social, cultural, and historical processes, and stimulate reflection on appropriate methodological frameworks for investigating them.

In 2024, students from the Philological Faculty of the University of Belgrade launched the online literary magazine Filoblok, which has become a distinctive starting point for reflecting on the broader issue of (new) media emerging within youth movements. The magazine operated during the student blockades of faculties in several Serbian university cities. These blockades were a reaction to the collapse of the canopy at the Main Railway Station in Novi Sad, which killed 16 people, a tragedy that was commonly regarded as a consequence of systemic corruption and institutional irresponsibility in Serbia. In other words, the blockades represented an act of student rebellion against state corruption.

The Filoblok editors did not want to continue the existing student literary magazine Vesna, but considered it necessary to establish a separate, socially engaged, yet also literary magazine (in the traditional sense of genre and structure) that would be published for as long as the blockades lasted. In addition, the student movement produced even more ephemeral leaflets, newspapers, and magazines at other faculties and youth institutions in Serbia, such as Glas Blokade (The Voice of Blockades) at the Faculty of Philosophy in Belgrade.

At the same time, university and high-school students did not abandon new media. On the contrary, they used it as much as possible to create new ways of communicating within their own (subcultural) groups and with the ‘outside’ public. Accordingly, during the blockades, more and more Instagram accounts were created (ad hoc student parliaments of every high school and university department had at least one or two accounts), hundreds of reels were released daily, new YouTube channels were created, short student films were produced, etc. Against this background, this thematic issue seeks to investigate why students turned to the traditional periodical genres when new media ecology, marked by Instagram, TikTok and podcast culture, dominates among Gen-Z.

This situation invites us to take a closer look at Slavic and South-Eastern European regions and countries – not just the ones in which anti-regime and anti-corruptive movements are currently visible (such as Serbia or Bulgaria) – and to investigate how youth subcultures function across different historical and sociopolitical contexts more broadly. Our presumption is that only by knowing and understanding the new language of youth subcultures in a wider context, we can properly analyse and interpret the meanings in a particular media outlet or periodical.

The editors propose four methodological frameworks within which Filoblok and similar recent student periodicals and youth subcultural products could be further approached:

1. Periodical studies and the history literary periodicals. These disciplines show that since the mid-19th century, youth movements and their literary magazines have played a driving role in the processes of social – national, class, cultural and gender – emancipation in Serbian, as well as in (post)Yugoslav, Slavic and South-Eastern European contexts.

2. Youth studies. As an emerging discipline within the humanities, youth studies enables researchers to understand the dynamics of student movements and their literary and cultural outputs, and, most importantly, to examine them as autonomous Gen-Z phenomena in relation to broader processes to which they undoubtedly belong.

3. Literary ethnography and folkloristics. Researchers are invited to interpret youth periodicals and subcultural products at the moment of their emergence, paying close attention to their language, symbolism, and modes of circulation. Whenever possible, contributors are encouraged to conduct participatory observation at movement events, including daily or weekly rituals, in order to capture the lived and performative dimensions of these practices. The creation and/or analysis of digital archives of movements’ folklore is also welcome.

4. Philosophy of history. Useful could be Alain Badiou’s elaboration of the process of the rebirth of history, spanning from 1848 to the present day and encompassing European revolutions of the mid-19th century through to the Arab Spring and similar movements. Even more relevant could be Badiou’s concept of “The Event” in the context of emancipation (which has proven a productive theoretical lens for interpreting the rhythm, namely the publication frequency of Filoblok magazine).

The aim of this thematic issue is threefold: (1) to examine the Serbian example as an initial case study, (2) to identify and examine the analogous movements and problems behind them in Slavic and South-Eastern European countries, and (3) to broaden research on youth movements around the world as a significant context for developing strategies to study this phenomenon in both the present and the past.

Examples of topics and issues we aim to address in this issue include:

• The role and visibility of contemporary ad hoc anti-regime youth movements and their subcultures in the media.
• New media (Instagram, TikTok, reels, Twitter/X) as a tool in youth movements.
• Genres, meanings, and messages of youth emancipatory subcultures across periodicals and media.
• Methodological approaches to studying youth movements and their subcultural production: ethnographic, immediate, and historical perspectives.
• Methodological insights from contemporary youth movements for the study of historical emancipatory youth movements and their periodicals.
• The circulation of youth movements in Slavic countries and around the world, and their presence in the media of that time.
• The influence of the youth movement(s) on neighbouring countries, and countries sympathetic to the movement, as visible in the media. International reactions to youth movement(s), as visible in the media.

 

Slavia Meridionalis is a multidisciplinary Open Access journal presenting research on the South Slavic countries and their connections with other cultural regions. It is indexed in Scopus (Elsevier) and Emerging Sources Citation Index (Clarivate Analytics), as well as CEEOL, DOAJ, EBSCO, ERIH Plus, Google Scholar, and other databases.

Authors are invited to submit English-language papers of up to 40,000 characters with spaces (including bibliography).

Timeline:

• Abstract in English (300 words) and a short bio-note (50–100 words) by 31 May 2026.
• Contacting selected authors by 30 June 2026.
• Submission of the manuscript by 31 December 2026.

Please send abstracts to the email addresses of the volume’s editors:

• stanibarac[at]gmail[dot]com
• katarzyna[dot]taczynska[at]ispan[dot]edu[dot]pl

Detailed information and guidelines for authors can be found on the journal’s website.

We will also consider publishing papers in English outside the main topic – in the “Imponderabilia” section, intended for contributions addressing particularly important issues within the journal’s thematic scope.

Feel free to contact the editors-in-charge of the issue:

• Stanislava Barać, stanibarac[at]gmail[dot]com
• Katarzyna Taczyńska, katarzyna[dot]taczynska[at]ispan[dot]edu[dot]pl