Walking the Gendered (in)Visibilities of Resistance in Prishtina, Kosovo

The city of Prishtina, the capital of Kosovo, is a complex and layered urban environment moulded by the country's turbulent history. The urban landscape bears the scars of conflict and displacement (Boussauw, 2012). In the post-conflict years, Prishtina's urban spaces have undergone major transformations marked by nation-building and patriarchal heroism, and by efforts to recalibrate the public image of who has the right to claim the city and whose history and memory count, rendering various stories visible (Krasniqi, 2025). Yet walking with those who have lived these deep transformations surfaces micro-histories of labour, resistance, and trauma, where slow memory confronts past violence and reproduces the image of space for those who follow the invisible footpaths in everyday life. Alternative memories matter (Palmberger, 2019, ProPeace Kosovo, 2022), and the embodied walkability experiences of places in these contested spaces, where ghosts of past memories were emplaced (Stevenson, 2014), allow once-brushed-away voices to resurface. Walking, therefore, has the capacity to collectively contest, reorder, and disorder memories (Edensor, 2005), revealing complexities of power, gender, and the struggle for inclusion in memorialisation and shaping the future of the post-conflict city.

This workshop builds on years of work by academics, activists, and mnemonic  communities in the city of Prishtina, who have been relentlessly working to influence existing efforts for the post-conflict healing process to become inclusive for all unvoiced stories. It aims to ensure the continuation of these efforts by embracing walkability as a lens and method to subvert invisibility processes. Working with the concept of Slow Memory (Wüstenberg, 2023), participants will cultivate practices of presence in contexts of uneven change, unearthing suppressed or forgotten memories of gendered resistance and activism that are entangled with the footpaths connecting individual experiences to collective memory. Participants will investigate walkability against a backdrop of latent violence and slow urban transformation, adopting methods that intentionally decelerate research to capture deep-rooted, often (in)visible narratives embedded within the city.

Over five days, participants will engage in lectures, exploratory walks, creative movement, and guided writing studios. Using the Poetics of Walkability framework (Embodiment, Narrative, Representation), they will develop collaborative maps that spatialize shared, contested, and gendered memories across Prishtina’s urban landscape. This workshop offers a platform for experimentation in interdisciplinary research and recentering walkability in memory policy, peace education and gender development agenda that address post-conflict recovery, justice, and healing. Developing this method and making it available for all ensures the sustainability and durability of these efforts. Therefore, this workshop aims to attract all who are interested in methods of voicing the other: students, scholars, practitioners, and community activists. It aims to include diverse complementary fields of studies that dig into the matter — social sciences, humanities, architecture, urban studies, (human) geography, political science and more — for an in-depth exploration of walkability through the intersections of gender, space, memory, history, agency and trauma, within the dynamic center of Prishtina.