Skip to main content
Mojca Kovačič, PhD
Head (of the Institute), Research Associate

+386 1 470 62 72

Mojca.kovacic@zrc-sazu.si


Identifiers:
ORCID SICRIS

Mojca Kovačič is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Ethnomusicology, ZRC SAZU, where she also serves as Head of the Institute. Her research focuses on contemporary and historical transformations of folk music, processes of heritagization, and questions of authenticity, identity, and cultural policy. She is particularly interested in how musical practices are interpreted, evaluated, and situated within social and institutional contexts, as well as in how sound co-produces social space. She lectures at the ZRC SAZU Postgraduate School and at the Academy of Music, University of Ljubljana.


Mojca Kovačič’s research is situated at the intersection of ethnomusicology, ethnology, anthropology of music, and critical heritage studies. Her core research focus lies in the processes of heritagization of musical practices, examining how certain musical forms come to be constituted as “folk,” “traditional,” or “heritage” through institutional, discursive, and performative processes. She is particularly concerned with the epistemological and aesthetic frameworks through which music is categorized, evaluated, and legitimized, as well as with the tensions between normative concepts of authenticity and actual performance practices.

Her work develops an analytical approach that brings together studies of authenticity, heritage theory, and affective and performative approaches to music. Within this framework, music is understood as a social practice operating simultaneously on the levels of representation, affect, and embodied experience, and as a field of negotiation between individual experiences and collective narratives.

Empirically, her current research interest addresses both historical and contemporary interpretations of folk music, particularly in the context of revival movements, institutionalized presentations, and media and political discourses. Earlier parts of her research include analyses of music in relation to politics, memory, and identity, notably studies of partisan song as an affective practice of collective memory and of representations of minority music in the context of migration and cultural policy, with a focus on processes of essentialization and ethnicization. Her work on soundscapes (from acoustemology of bell ringing to more recent studies of street and religious sounds) examines how social space is produced through sonic practices, including ethnicized and racialized imaginaries and the operation of religious power.

Methodologically, her research combines ethnographic fieldwork, archival analysis (particularly of manuscript and sound sources), discourse analysis, and audiovisual documentation. It is grounded in a reflexive approach that incorporates autoethnographic elements and critically addresses the role of the researcher in the production of knowledge.

Her work contributes to the understanding of contemporary transformations of folk music in the context of global and post-socialist social changes, and addresses broader questions concerning the relationships between heritage, creativity, politics, and musical experience.

 

All publications (COBISS): https://bib.cobiss.net/bibliographies/si/webBiblio/bib201_20260423_111132_26012.html 

 

Professional memberships
  • Head of the Institute of Ethnomusicology, ZRC SAZU (since 2019).
  • National Representative at the International Council for Traditions of Music and Dance (ICTMD).
  • Member of ICTMD Study Groups (Music and Minorities; Music and Dance in Southeastern Europe; Multipart Music; Music of the Slavic Speaking World).
  • Member of the European Seminar in Ethnomusicology and the Music@AlpeAdria network.
  • Vice-President and Board Member of the Cultural and Ethnomusicological Society Folk Slovenia.
  • Member of the Slovenian Ethnological Society and the Slovenian Musicological Society.
  • Member of editorial boards of scientific journals (Traditiones, Musicologist, Scientific Herald, Problems of Music Ethnology) and guest editor of special issues (Traditiones, Musicological Annual).
  • Member of editorial board of monographic series Folkloristični zvezki and digital collections Etnomuza, Etnofon and DigGNI.
Research areas
Musicology H320
Cultural anthropology, ethnology S220