Ognjen Kojanić
Ognjen Kojanić
QUALIFICATIONS
2020 Ph.D., Anthropology, University of Pittsburgh
2014 M.A., Sociology and Social Anthropology, Central European University
2013 B.A., Ethnology and Anthropology, University of Belgrade
PRINCIPAL RESEARCH INTERESTS
Environmental Anthropology; Infrastructure Studies; Urban Political Ecology; Environmental Justice; Political Economy; Labor Studies; Southeastern Europe
RESEARCH PROFILE
I am an environmental and economic anthropologist with a primary geographic focus in Southeastern Europe. The research questions I work on are related to, on the one hand, infrastructure and human-environment relations, and, on the other hand, property relations and class politics. In my ongoing research, I examine the political ecology of wetlands in dialogue with infrastructure studies. I focus on infrastructure in (former) wetlands in the Pančevo Marshes in metropolitan Belgrade, the capital of Serbia and its biggest city. Most recently, I have turned to examining voluminal politics, by which I mean decision-making and social contestations related to three-dimensional assemblages in wetlands. In my previous research project, I examined property relations as the material basis for workers’ agency by focusing on the case of ITAS, a metalworking company in Croatia. Through my analysis of the material transformations within the company and legal and discursive changes in Croatia, I offer an anthropological theorization of the limits of alternative capitalist practices in postsocialism. Parallel to my major research projects, I have been committed to highlighting the importance of scholarship in and on Eastern Europe within mainstream social and cultural anthropology.
Journal Articles
2024 Micron Engagements, Macro Histories: Machines and the Agency of Labor in a Worker-Owned Company. History and Anthropology 35 (4): 827–47. DOI.
2024 Estimations of Value in ‘Belgrade’s Amazonia.’ Economic Anthropology 11 (1): 112–21. DOI.
2023 Anthropology of the Balkans. In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Anthropology. DOI.
2023 On Redefining Boundaries and Opening New Terrains in a Peripheral Anthropological Tradition. Anthropological Quarterly, 96 (3): 567–81. DOI.
2022 Rethinking the Failure of Waste Infrastructures with Jackals. Roadsides, 8: 58-64. DOI.
2021 ‘We’re All Here for the Money’: Solidarity and Divisions in a Worker-Owned Company. Dialectical Anthropology, 45 (2): 151–168. DOI.
2020 Theory from the Peripheries: What Can the Anthropology of Postsocialism Offer to European Anthropology? Anthropological Journal of European Cultures, 29 (2): 49–66. DOI.
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. DOI.
2015 Nostalgia as a Practice of the Self in Post-Socialist Serbia. Canadian Slavonic Papers : Revue Canadienne des Slavistes, 57 (3–4): 195–212. DOI.
Book Chapters
2024 Countering Post-Industrial Capitalism in the Former Yugoslavia through Art: The Example of the Mural Factories to the Workers. In: Frances Guerin and Magda Szczesniak (eds.): Visual Culture of Post-Industrial Europe. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, pp. 101–120.
Forthcoming Uneven Development: Approaching Alternative Capitalist Practices in the Former Yugoslavia. In: Jelena Tošić, Sabine Strasser, and Annika Lems (eds.): Re-Turns, Entanglements and Collaborations: Anthropology in/of Europe. New York: Berghahn Books.
Complete Bibliography (PDF)
Ongoing Projects and Grants
2025 The National Institute for Research on the Socioeconomic Impact of Diseases and Systemic Risks (SYRI). Programme EXCELES (LX22NPO5101), Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports. Research Associate.
Past Projects and Grants
NONE
Board Memberships
Ongoing Economic Anthropology Network, European Association of Social Anthropologists
2022-2024 Society for the Anthropology of Europe, American Anthropological Association
External Reviewing
Project Evaluation: EUTOPIA-SIF
Book Proposal Evaluation: Routledge
Journal Articles Manuscript Review: Social Anthropology, Cultural Anthropology, Anthropologica, Economic Anthropology, Balkanologie, Social Inclusion, Ethnologia Polona, Studia Ethnologica Croatica
Invited Talks, Public Lectures or Roundtables
2022 April 20. “To Build or Not to Build a Port in ‘Belgrade’s Amazonia’: Infrastructure and Human-Wetland Relations in Belgrade, Serbia.” University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany.
2022 February 11. “Mastering ‘Expanded Reproduction’: Self-Managed Socialism in Yugoslavia and Its Legacy.” Carnegie Mellon University and University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA.
2021 November 17–21. Roundtable “Socialist Anthropology.” Truth and Responsibility. AAA Annual Meeting. Hybrid, Baltimore, MD.
2021 June 2. “’This Machine Should Be in a Museum’: Managing Unevenness in a Worker-Owned Company.” Online, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK.
2020 November 5–14. Roundtable “Anthropology as Work: Interacademic Labor Solidarities.” Raising Our Voices 2020, AAA; Online.
2018 November 6. “ITAS i promjene geografije proizvodnje u (post-)jugoslovenskom prostoru” [“ITAS and the Changes of the Geography of Production in the (Post-) Yugoslav Space”]. Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research, Zagreb, Croatia.
Conference and Workshop Organisation
2024 Panel “Doing and Undoing (with) the Anthropology of Infrastructure” (co-convened with Uri Ansenberg of the Open University of Israel and Elias Strand of the University of Oslo at the 2024 EASA Biennial Meeting; Barcelona, Spain)
2023 Workshop “Capitalism, Fascism, and the Environment” (co-convened by the EASA Anthropology of Fascisms and Anthropology of Economy Networks in Cologne, Germany).
2019 Panel “Making Property: Ownership, Dispossession, and Imagining Equivalence” (co-organized with Julia Sizek of UC Berkeley at the 2019 AAA Annual Meeting; Vancouver, BC, Canada).
Public Outreach
2024 The Limits of Kin in Belgrade: Fighting Against Air Pollution in the Slipstream of Racial Capitalism. Berliner Gazette. April 3.
2023 Worker Management at ITAS Represents a Great Success. LeftEast. September 8.
2022 Environmental Issues Spark Large-Scale Protests in Serbia. LeftEast. January 31.
2021 Ruins and Precarity in European Peripheries. AJEC Blog, May 14.
2020 Introduction: Creative Destruction, Destructive Creation (co-authored with Ana Flavia Badue). Anthropological Theory Commons, February 21.
2020 Creative Destruction in Fits and Starts: Machinery Replacement in a Worker-Owned Company. Anthropological Theory Commons, February 21.
2019 AE Interviews Heath Cabot. American Ethnologist website, October 22.
2018 Flipping the Transition Script. Anthropology News, April 13.
2017 CEU crisis in Budapest: Attacks on universities are tactics used by regimes in 'illiberal democracies'. Firstpost. April 11.
2017 International Women's Day 2017: Activists are reclaiming feminism, resistance, politics from 'pantsuit nation' reps. Firstpost. March 09.
2016 Brexit: Xenophobic parties not dominant but their politics will go on. Firstpost. June 25.
