This "Walking Workshop" brought together TheGAME members, guest academics, and people with expertise by experience, to present work in the field of migration while interacting with part of the Route
Date:
Event location: From Nugla, Croatia, to Rakitovec and Socerb, Slovenia, and Dolina and in Trieste, Italy.
Type: TheGAME events
Between 16th and 18th June, 2026, we organized the fourth workshop of the project, a walking seminar taking place between Croatia and Italy. The main goal of this workshop was to move the conventional seminar format onto the field, i.e. on the route itself. We wanted participants to present their work in the field of migration while actively interacting with this part of the Balkan Route. Secondly, we also wanted to collaboratively assess the utility of researching routes through movement (instead of “sedentary scholarship”) and specifically researching experiences of migrant walking through walking.
This unique seminar included Claudio Minca, Emma Beatrice Farina, Shahid Aziz, Alexandra Rijke and Lucija Klun Turk from TheGAME project; Abdelwahed Laouchem, Samer Arkawi, Nana Desmond and Hasan Alhallaq as experts by experience; Jošt Žaga, Jure Gombač and Nataša Rogelja Caf from the Slovenian Migration Institute; Nick Shepherd from Aarhus University (Denmark); and Jason De Leon, Nicole Smith, Elizbeth Petrick and Nicole Fenzke from University of California, Los Angeles (USA). The team spent three days walking between key migration stopovers like Nugla in Croatia, Rakitovec and Socerb in Slovenia, Dolina and in Trieste, Italy.
The path we walked was based on pinned locations that a migrant family used back in 2021, when they managed to walk safely from Bihać, Bosnia and Herzegovina, to Trieste, Italy, where they sought asylum. When the family first walked this path in April 2021 they were pushed back from Slovenia, just before entering Italy. When they tried again, in June 2021, they reached Trieste. In agreement with them we used a section of this no-longer-used route to conduct the seminar.
The workshop began in Trieste, with a welcome and introduction, and from there participants took a shuttle to Nugla, Croatia, to begin “walking the route.” This itinerant part of the seminar was organized together with Jure Gombač (Slovenian Migration Institute), who led the walking group.
The first formal session, “Experiencing the route,” took place when we arrived in Rakitovec, Slovenia, where Abelwahed Laouchem, Samer Arkawi, Hasan Alhallaq and Nana Desmond presented their own experiences of the route. In the second session that evening, “Walking-writing the route,” Nataša Rogelja Caf (Slovenian Migration Institute) presented the concept of walking seminars.
Building from this context and discussion, the second day of the seminar was entirely dedicated to walking. The group walked approximately 24 kilometres, beginning with an ascent to the Karst ridge that they followed for the whole day until reaching Castle Socerb and descending through the forest into Dolina, Italy.
The last day of the workshop took place back at University of Trieste (organized with the assistance of Dragan Umek). We had two sessions, both chaired by Lucija Klun Turk. In the first session called “Material culture on the Route” we attended presentations by Jason de Leon (UCLA) and Jure Gombač. In the second session of the day, Claudio Minca, Dragan Umek, Emma Beatrice Farina (University of Bologna) and Nick Shepherd (Aarhus University) talked about the methodological and ethical implications of “Walking methods and counter-mapping the Route”.
