About Me

I am a cultural anthropologist studying political economy. My research is based in Eastern Europe, where I examine the material basis for everyday politics in socialism and post-socialism.

In my first book project, tentatively titled “Reluctant Owners: Managing Labor, Class, and Institutions in Postsocialist Capitalism,” I focus on the case of ITAS, a machine tool factory in Croatia. As a rare example of worker shareholding in Southeastern Europe, this company is often described as a successful attempt to build an alternative to capitalist property relations that addresses rising social inequality. However, the fact that ITAS worker-shareholders lacked power and capital was palpable during my fieldwork: while they appreciated the fact that the company had survived and that jobs had stayed in the local community, most of them emphasized exigencies of economic survival that put daily pressure on the company. Shifting between scales to examine transnational political economic changes, legal and discursive shifts in Croatia and beyond, and material transformations within the company, I track how worker-shareholders encountered limitations imposed by hegemonic practices in peripheral capitalism.

In my new research project, I am translating the questions that stem from my interests in political economy into the field of environmental anthropology. My previous work broadly addresses the question of how working-class politics relate to the material aspects of workers’ lives. I am pursuing a similar set of questions by theorizing how environmental politics relate to the material aspects of human-environment relations. Specifically, I ask 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. 

(April 2022)