Current Research
Future as Predicament: Political Life after Catastrophe
My current book project, Future as Predicament: Political Life after Catastrophe, is the result of over two years of doctoral fieldwork supported by the SSRC and IREX. Future as Predicament chronicles the efforts of Bosnian citizens—primarily in the capital city, Sarajevo, and Bosnia’s northwestern provinces— to reimagine both the future and the political itself in a moment marked by a profound sense of an impasse. It draws on an extensive archive of ethnographic observations and interviews with political activists, community leaders, and “ordinary” citizens, and on historical and media research, to trace the predicaments of future-making through both everyday forms of politics and exceptional political events. In telling these stories, this book also reveals Bosnia as a site that exemplifies wide-reaching political anxieties that mark the current historical moment, which include the loss of optimism about the future that characterized modernization programs, skepticism about the transformative power of political action and growing suspicion of democratization as a civilizational project. Yet, as I show in this work, the aftermaths of catastrophe also fuel an intense urge to forge new futures and open up space for unconventional and experimental kinds of political action (including street provocations, satirical play, and puppetry), that foster new models of political belonging and solidarity.
Reclaiming Dita —a collaborative graphic ethnography
with Andrew Gilbert (Toronto) and Boris Stapić (Sarajevo)
This research project joins recent attempts at experimental collaboration to ask what kinds of insight, rapport and evidence can be produced when two anthropologists enter a site together, in a space already inhabited by multiple forms of collaboration, cooperation and competition among industrial workers, activists, labor organizers, and politically engaged local academics? Our research site is the worker-occupied and partially operational detergent factory “Dita” in the city of Tuzla in Bosnia-Herzegovina, which has emerged as a kind of test-case for the possibilities and limits of a new labor politics in this postsocialist and postwar region. Our project asks: What happens to labor-based forms of political action in the context of global deindustrialization (and specifically in a postsocialist world)? What forms of politics and sociality are possible after the loss of mass utopia which was so central to state-centered Fordist imaginaries of both socialism and liberalism? What creative forms of engagement might grow up around a socialist factory decimated by postwar privatization, and the complex of machinery, chemicals, relations and people that compose it? Finally, what forms of ethnographic and para-ethnographic representation may be necessary in order to capture this colossal industrial environment and the complex entanglements between people and things that enable the production of commercial goods and political possibilities?
Watersheds: Postsocialist Infrastructure and the Politics of Water Supply in Postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina
At the start of the 21st century, water and infrastructure are emerging as key global technological and political issues, while the question of how successfully they are governed, maintained and distributed is also becoming the measure of the viability of futures to come. Bosnia-Herzegovina is a country with significant water wealth and a robust water-related national imaginary, tied to its many rivers, centuries-old water supply infrastructure, renowned mineral springs, and thermal waters first used for medicinal purposes during the Roman Empire. Yet amidst this natural abundance, and no shortage of water-centered development scheme linked, for example, to bottled water export, ecotourism, and hydropower, over the last two years, Bosnian capital Sarajevo has been experiencing frequent and prolonged cutoffs in the water supply. Despite being a part of an effort to repair the city’s troubled and (still) state-owned waterworks, these shortages have been engendering bitter complaints and protests among residents of Sarajevo, many of whom remember well the water cutoffs that ordered everyday life during the 1992-5 Bosnian War. The disaffected citizens perceive these interruptions as a form of everyday “terror”—suggesting that the crisis offers a unique vantage point from which to investigate how larger macro-political transformations shape affective worlds and political, infrastructural and environmental imaginaries.
What set of circumstances enables such a paradoxical situation marked by a simultaneous abundance and scarcity of water, and what does this tension reveal about the political life of infrastructure and its capacity to reshape the experience of citizenship? This project pursues answers to these questions through ethnographic fieldwork focused on multiple stakeholders, including political activists, environmentalists, engineers, government agencies, international financial organizations and ordinary citizens attempting to manage these infrastructural breakdowns.
Saving Lake Nula: Postindustrial Natures and New Frontiers of Environmentalism in Postwar Bosnia Herzegovina
a collaborative project with my student, Yanna Jović (University of Ottawa)
In 2018, an activist campaign in the central-Bosnian town of Vareš successfully challenged the EU-sponsored ¡Vamos! Program's plan to test underwater mining equipment in a nearby lake “Nula” that formed out of the pit of the now-defunct coalmine “Smreka.” ¡Vamos! and its local partners claimed that this project might bring back jobs to this deindustrialized and depopulated part of Bosnia-Herzegovina. But the project's opponents focused on potential environmental hazards this kind of testing, pointing to the murky ethics of bringing experimental technology to a poor country with weak environmental regulations. Both groups sought to position themselves in relation to the town’s history and present-day predicaments. Vareš was once infamous for its high levels of pollution caused by the local steelworks and the coal mine, but those activities came to a halt with the start of the 1992-1995 Bosnian War. During this time, the natural environment began to recover, and in some cases, overtake the industrial ruins of the steelworks itself. The newly-formed lake became a recreational area, enjoyed by swimmers, fishermen, and picnickers. Hence, this reclaimed nature became central to the hoped-for economic revitalization of the region via ecological and rural tourism.
What happens when postindustrial natures become a site of environmentalist concern? How do past experiences of pollution and toxicity shape the way local people think about environmental risk? And how do these local histories intersect with the new, trans-European regime of distribution of environmental risks and harms, exemplified by a project such as ¡Vamos!?