About
Diasporas Speaking
A research, podcast, and archive project dedicated to the migration histories of Balkan diaspora communities, Albanian, Bosniak, Kosovar, Serbian, Croatian, Macedonian, Romani communities, and beyond, across the UK, Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, North America and more.
The project
Diasporas Speaking is an independent podcast and archive project dedicated to preserving the migration histories of Balkan communities across Europe and beyond. Each episode brings together scholars, writers, and community members to explore what it means to carry a homeland in your memory, and what gets lost, transformed, or rediscovered across generations.
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.
Where it began
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 Bosnian war and the refugees that were produced as a consequence, similarly to Kosovar-Albanian communities that now live in Germany existed, 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 project began with conversations with people who came to Germany as Gastarbeiter in the 1970s and never went back, with families who fled Sarajevo or Prishtina in the 1990s and rebuilt their lives in London or Vienna, with second and third generation children navigating identities that no single word quite captures. Those conversations became the foundation for the podcast, the archive project, and the writing platform.
Our values
Community first
Balkan diaspora communities are not a monolith. Each community, Albanian, Bosniak, Kosovar, Serbian, Croatian, Macedonian, Romani, carries distinct histories and experiences. We work with communities on their own terms.
Open access
The histories we collect belong to the communities that lived them. While all materials are made freely available, a written request of nature of use should be made to Diasporas Speaking to understand how our stories will be portrayed.
The team
Who we are
Rina Limoni
Founder & Host
Rina is a researcher and writer working at the intersection of diaspora studies, oral history, and cultural memory. Her research focuses on Balkan communities in the German-speaking world, the Gastarbeiter generation, the post-1990s refugee wave, and the second and third generations navigating identity between two cultures. She founded Diasporas Speaking to create a permanent record of these histories before they are lost, and hosts the podcast. By day she works with data and research.
The Balkan diaspora did not leave history behind when it crossed the border. It carried history with it in its language, its silences, and its stories.
Diasporas Speaking
Get in touch
Work with us
We welcome collaborations with researchers, community organisations, cultural institutions, and individuals connected to Balkan diaspora communities. If you have a family history to share, archival material to contribute, or a piece of writing to submit, we want to hear from you.