Jump to main content

Ognjen Kojanić

Humboldt Postdoctoral Research Fellow

Department of Social & Cultural Anthropology

Period of stay: April 2022 – September 2023

ognjenkojanic.com

Research Focus
  • Environmental Studies (the Anthropocene, infrastructure, urban environments, wetland landscapes)
  • Economic Anthropology (the political economy of capitalism and socialism, uneven development, property, labor, class)
  • Eastern Europe (Croatia, Serbia)
Current Research Project

I will be working on the project “Infrastructure, Political Economy, and Human-Environment Relations in Belgrade Wetlands” during my Humboldt Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the University of Cologne. The broad question I am asking is how urban infrastructural projects have shaped relationships with and discourses about wetlands in Belgrade, Serbia, over the past century. I consider how the urban environment is managed in the context of anthropogenic climate change, and how this process (re)produces social inequality for the affected populations. I aim to identify and analyze competing ideas and practices of relating to wetland landscapes at the level of broad political-economic regimes, discourses, expert and lay knowledge, and political interests.

Education and professional career

2020
University of Pittsburgh, PhD in Anthropology

2014
Central European University, MA in Sociology and Social Anthropology

2013
University of Belgrade, BA in Ethnology and Anthropology

Selected Publications

2021. “‘We’re All Here for the Money’: Solidarity and Divisions in a Worker-Owned Company.” Dialectical Anthropology, 45 (2): 151–168.

2020. “Theory from the Peripheries: What Can the Anthropology of Postsocialism Offer to European Anthropology?” Anthropological Journal of European Cultures, 29 (2): 49–66.

2017. “‘You Can’t Weed Out Corruption’: Railway Workers’ Assessments of the State in Post-Socialist Serbia.” Glasnik Etnografskog instituta SANU, 65 (1): 47–63.

2015. “Nostalgia as a Practice of the Self in Post-Socialist Serbia.” Canadian Slavonic Papers : Revue Canadienne des Slavistes, 57 (3–4): 195–212.