My research spans four broad themes.
STATEBUILDING AND PEACEBUILDING everydays
My monograph investigates how the focus on different subjects disrupts the confines of established scholarly and policy discourses on international statebuilding and peacebuilding interventions. While I have pursued a similar argument in my article that discusses the presence of Balkan subjects in existing intervention literature, the monograph draws on my ethnographic fieldwork in Serbia. The book takes forward critiques of intervention by showing that conceptual parameters of intervention hide more than illuminate in the project of changing the subjects of our scholarship. As an alternative, it proposes to see intervention as part of a wider politics of improvement.
FIELDWORK AND INTERPRETIVE METHODS & METHODOLOGIES
My research often relies on ethnography and narrative interviews. I’m interested in how different types of knowledge reshape and challenge our concepts and approaches. I explore the methodological possibilities and limitations of ethnographic and narrative methods, and the politics of specific methodological choices. I co-edited the volume Fieldwork as Failure (with Jakub Záhora) to showcase some of the pressures and joys of working with ethnographic methods in different stages of academic career. At the moment, I’m exploring ways in which human-centred methods — such as interview and participant observation — can be used to explore more-than-human relations.
INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL ECOLOGIES OF LAND
My current project investigates political ecologies of land in Croatia and Serbia. I am particularly interested in ways in which agriculture, conservation, and tourism intertwine in narratives of improvement and Europeanisation. My two primary sites are development and conservation projects in Cetinska krajina (Croatia) and land privatisations in Serbia. You can read more about my approach in this article on human-soil relations. In addition to academic publications, and I have written non-academic pieces on land privatisation and land grabbing in Serbia (with Sladjana Lazić) and ways of using socialist experiences to imagine more just agricultural futures.
POSTCOLONIAL & DECOLONIAL THOUGHT in/about SEE
I’m interested in ways ways in which critical studies of Balkanism are inspired by and contribute to postcolonial and decolonial thought. I co-edited the volume Decolonial Theory and Practice in Southeast Europe (with Polina Manolova and Philipp Lottholz) that reviews much of the existing literature and showcases possible directions in the project of situating the Balkans in global coloniality. My article, Balkan subjects in intervention literature, shows some potentials and problems of decolonial reconstruction from existing literature on intervention in the Balkans. I’m very happy to be a part of growing community of scholars working on these topics in Central, East, and South East Europe — you can see some of these networks here.
