A trilingual and critical diaspora podcast series chronicling Kosovar, Albanian and Balkan diaspora histories. Curated by Rina Limoni.
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Selma Jahić
Selma Jahić, who together with her brother and mother survived the Srebrenica genocide, shares her family's story of survival, loss, and the ongoing fight for justice and remembrance. On 11 July 1995, over 8,000 Bosniak men and boys were systematically murdered — the worst atrocity on European soil since the Second World War.
Podcast series
Our episodes are organised into thematic series, each one tracing a distinct thread of Balkan diaspora history.
The first generation came for work and stayed for decades. This series traces the family histories of Kosovar-Albanian Gastarbeiter — their journeys, their silences, and the children who grew up between two languages, two countries, and two versions of home.
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The wars of Yugoslav dissolution created one of the largest refugee crises in post-war European history. This series documents what that displacement looked and felt like from the inside — through the voices of those who lived it.
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The wave of Balkan migration that followed the wars of the 1990s looked different from what came before. This series examines the new patterns, new destinations, and new kinds of belonging that emerged in the early 2000s.
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Some silences are chosen. Others are imposed. This series traces the difference — examining the stories that were never told aloud, the archives that were never kept, and what it costs a community when its histories remain unspoken.
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For the grandchildren of migrants, heritage is something inherited rather than lived. This series asks what it means to claim an identity you have never inhabited — and how the third generation is forging its own relationship with the Balkans.
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A series exploring the Balkans as a site of longing, return, and contested identity — through literature, personal testimony, and critical conversation with those who came to the region from outside and never quite left.
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This series centres the experiences of queer women and LGBTQ+ members of the Balkan diaspora, tracing how gender, sexuality, migration, and belonging intersect across borders. It explores the quiet negotiations, the ruptures, and the acts of self‑definition that shape queer diasporic life.
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This series explores contemporary Balkan politics through conversations with scholars and researchers working on the region’s latest developments. It will also highlight activism, emerging movements, and the people, ideas, and curiosities shaping life across and around the Balkans.
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Diasporas Speaking grew out of a simple observation: that the people best placed to tell the story of Balkan migration were rarely the ones being asked. Academic research on Yugoslav labour migration, the Kosova and Bosnian wars and the refugees that were produced as a consequence, but it spoke about these communities rather than with them. Journalism covered the wars and the refugee numbers, but not the long, quiet decades of settlement that followed.
The podcast is produced in collaboration with the Breaking Archival Silences project, which works to surface and digitise personal and community archives that have never entered the public record.