Maksimović, Maja and Joksimović, Jelena (Utvić, Mirjana)

The study attempts to discover elements of learning by practicing the right to the city through the embodiment and re-articulation of the identity of the flâneuse.  In this urban investigation, we will explore perspectives that emerge from the city, how they are connected to specific city sites, and how they form our becomings having in mind gendered division of urban life. To do so we will engage in reflexive wandering and performing in the city. Learning that unfolds with this action is bodily and sensorial process of reading the layers of public spaces in the city. As wandering implies a turn of the main road, learning process is marked by unpredictability and meandering. It does not follow familiar path that leads to specific learning outcomes, but involves a journey through the unknown and unowned places. Learning that evolves trough wandering around side roads of Belgrade is what we are interested to describe by mapping experiences of the three authors. We offer an account of wa(o)ndering women, their stories told by their bodies inscribed by the city and inscribed in the city we live in. Wa(o)ndering women is a project made by three women (or more), us researchers, who, by provoking traditional academic epistemology and writing, engage in a research of city, body and learning by being in the world that opens itself to sensorial experiences, creating time/space together with our memories, scars, city textures and imagination. We discover, are discovered, and our bodies become a landscape shaped by the scenography of the city made of beings, objects, wind, light…

Maja Maksimović is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Pedagogy and Andragogy at the Faculty of Philosophy University of Belgrade. At the moment, she focuses her research practice on the entanglement of educational, activist, and artistic, trying to incorporate critical, embodied, spatial and imaginative into a repertoire of action. Previously, her research mainly considered critical discourse analysis of various concepts of adult education and learning (lifelong learning, quality of education, etc.), but also inquiry into historical emergence of adult education policies in Serbia through postcolonial lenses. Maja has an intensive cooperation with NGOs, self-organized groups and activist organizations, trying to build stronger links among academia and civil sector, but also to explore public spaces as participatory educational sites.

Jelena Joksimovic is a PhD student at the Department of psychology, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Belgrade where she works as a teacher associate. Her research is in the field of psychology of education, specifically in quality of the teaching/learning process. She is also a co-founder of the collective Schoolcity that is working on a long term action research inside one deprived local community in urban periphery of Belgrade. She identifies herself as an activist and a researcher. She also works as an expert associate in the Center for the Promotion of Science in Belgrade Serbia. 

Mirjana Utvić is an architect, maker and urban explorer based in Belgrade, Serbia. She designs and crafts tools and spaces, with the intention to empower critical thinking and creativity within the local community, by triggering experimentation, play and co-creation. Her research and practice are developed through her work in the Schoolcity since 2016, Center for the promotion of science since 2015, School of urban practices since 2012 and City Guerilla-creative laboratory since 2011. She is the author of multiple temporary public and multimedia interactive objects

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