Research activity:
Since 2023 Dr Maja Bjelica centers her research activity in the field of environmental humanities within the frame of the basic national research project “Grain of Salt, Crystallising Cohabitation: Salt-making as Experiential Environmental Wisdom” (ARIS J6-50196). As principal investigator she strives for a transdisciplinary approach to the research topic, i.e. salt-working, and towards cross-pollinating research insights and reflections. She focuses on revealing salt-working as an activity springing from the cohabitation between the human and nature, the individual, the community and the environment, the subject and the life-world, always being porously connected with each other.
She also participates in the research program “Liminal Spaces: Areas of Cultural and Societal Cohabitation in the Age of Risk and Vulnerability” (ARIS P6-0279), focusing on philosophical, anthropological and cultural aspects of cultural pluralism and intercultural dialogue. Special topics that she covers in this context are connected to the ethics of hospitality, as well as links between these topics and aspects of thinking of contemporary Europe and its borders (the researcher has devoted part of her specialization in her previous research work to Turkey and its cultures).
Dr Maja Bjelica was involved in different project teams led by members of the Institute of Philosophical Studies. She collaborated in the basic research project “Surviving the Anthropocene through Inventing New Ecological Justice and Biosocial Philosophical Literacy” (ARRS J7-1824), where she focused in researching (ethics of) listening as a practice or a path towards developing an ecological awareness and ethical cohabitation.
She collaborated also in the basic research project “Interreligious Dialogue – a Basis for Coexisting Diversity in the Light of Migration and the Refugee Crisis” (ARRS J6-9393) exploring the different aspects of the role of listening for interreligious dialogue, as it is an essential task for every person in order to contribute to interreligious communication. The researcher focused on the possibility of the emergence of an ethics of listening based on musical engagement, which represents a hospitable space of encouragement for mutually affectionate intersubjective gestures.
She was engaged in two other projects: “Reanimating Cosmic Justice: Poetics of the Feminine” (ARRS J6-8265), through which she focused on connecting the philosophy of Luce Irigaray with practices of the Turkish Alevi communities, and “Between Politicas and Ethics: Towards a New World Culture of Hospitality and Non-Violence” (ARRS J6-5565) to which she contributed as a young researcher through deepening the understanding of the ethics of hospitality through philosophies of continental thinkers, such as Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida.
She is actively involved in organizational and programme committees of international scientific conferences and other events organized by the Institute for Philosophical Studies. She contributed to the preparations the following events: Poesis of Peace (Gozd Martuljek, Slovenia, May 15–18, 2014), »borders/debordering«: Towards a New World Culture of Hospitality (Gozd Martuljek, Slovenia, June 30–July 3, 2016), Terrors of Injustice: Gender Violence and Ethics of Shame (Utrecht, Netherlands, October 4–5, 2018), New Philosophical and Theological Foundations for Christian-Muslim Dialogue (Portorož, Slovenia, May 27–29, maj 2019), Towards Tolerant and Plural Dialogues of Values and Religion in the Euro-Mediterranean (Triest, Italy, September 26–27, 2019), Religious Peace-Building, Inter-Religious Dialogue, Migrations and Refugee Crisis (Koper and online, April 19, 2021), Surviving the Anthropocene: Towards Elemental Literacy and Interdisciplinary Partnerships (online, May 24–2,6 2021), Airy Encounters: Respiratory Philosophy and Sound Arts (Helsinki, June 6–8, 2022), Respiratory Philosophy: A Paradigm Shift (Portorož, June 18–21, 2023).