research (until July 2022)
main research interests
My research centres on ethnographic investigations of transformations of hope (e.g. yearnings for 'normal lives', expectations, cynicism, temporal orientation, imagined futures), particularly in everyday engagements with 'the state' (e.g. state effect, grid-making, sovereignty, senses of entitlement, statecraft) in Bosnia and Herzegovina. This raises questions of political subjectivity (e.g. everyday geopolitics, hegemony, resistance/compliance, socialism, neoliberalisation, (anti)nationalism) and the work of borders (e.g. spatialisation of polities, lines and tidemarks, infrastructure, mobility regulation, documents, entrapment).
In previous work based on ethnographic research in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia and Serbia, I have focused on experiences of home, displacement and entrapment; on everyday configurations of nationality (in particular antinationalism), on masculinity, and on contested remembering and forgetting (memories of violence, jugonostalgija and recollections of 'normal lives'). In all my research I am particularly interested in the interrelations between two or more of the above, always on the intersection of postwar and postsocialist (post-Cold War) transformations, and always with a focus on social justice, inequality and solidarity.
research projects
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'normal lives', hope and the state
remaking borders
home-making
postYU antinationalism