Research focus
political imagination
humanitarianism, borders, refugee camps
clientelism, favor, gifts
nationalism, the state, policy
gender and sexuality
histories of ethnology and cultural anthropology
Germany, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Europe
(In the winter semester of 2024, Prof. Brković is a Visiting Fellow at Harvard University's Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies)
Biography
Čarna Brković is Professor of Cultural Studies/European Ethnology at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. After completing her Bachelor's degree in Ethnology and Anthropology at the University of Belgrade and her PhD in Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester, she taught at the University of Göttingen and the University of Regensburg. She was also a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Advanced Studies at the Central European University.
Her work focuses on inequalities, power, social complexity, and ambiguity. At the center of her research interests is developing concepts that help explain how people of different social statuses in Europe pursue their projects for a good life.
Her book "Realigning Humanitarianism in the Balkans: From Cold War Politics to Neoliberal Ethics" is coming out with Indiana University Press in 2025. Realigning Humanitarianism in the Balkans examines how the fall of socialism changed the humanitarian project. The first part of the book explores how the Yugoslav Red Cross pursued humanitarianism in the 1970s within the framework of the non-aligned movement. Cold War humanitarianism was shaped by intense debates among intellectuals, politicians, and diplomats from capitalist, socialist, and non-aligned countries about the boundaries between the political and the nonpolitical. Fascinating discussions over what humanitarianism is, what it could be, and what it ought to be in relation to justice and revolution were largely forgotten with the fall of socialism.
The second part of the book tells the story of the liberal humanitarianism implemented by Montenegro’s local organizations in the 2010s. After the Cold War, in a world where history was declared to have ended, Western European interpretations of universal values like humanitarianism suddenly seemed without an alternative. Liberal humanitarianism reinforced an ethics of professionalized aid and revealed the ambivalences of Eastern European ‘whiteness’—a subject position that involves both an invitation to join the ranks of ‘white Europeans’ and an inability to fully do so due to structural barriers, all while differentiating from those racialized as ‘non-white’.
By tracing the shifts in humanitarianism between the West, the East, and the South, the book uncovers how the fall of state socialism shaped not only humanitarian practices but also the ways we analyze them—often in ways that have gone unnoticed.
Brković is the PI on a research project called Redistributive Imaginaries, which is part of a consortium of five European universities that won CHANSE funding to investigate new redistributive imaginaries in Europe.
Her first monograph, Managing Ambiguity, is an ethnographic study of how neoliberal reforms in healthcare and social welfare in Bosnia and Herzegovina fostered clientelism. The book illustrates how the neoliberal emphasis on local community and self-responsibility was translated into clientelist modes of relating and vice versa. It also ethnographically demonstrates how some people attained official political positions by managing the ambiguity of social welfare as a civic right and a personal gift.
Brković supervises doctoral students interested in what has been happening with political imagination after the fall of socialism in Europe, especially in humanitarianism, activism, gender, and sexuality.
Service:
- Senior member of the Editorial Board of the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Anthropology;
- Board member of SIEF;
- Co-spokeswoman of the DGEKW-Commission Gender Research and Queer Anthropology
- Member of the Editorial Board of the Political and Legal Anthropology Review PoLAR (2019-2022);
- Secretary of the AAAs Society for the Anthropology of Europe (2020-2022);
- Co-founder and co-convenor of the Anthropology of Humanitarianism Network der EASA (2018-2020).
Research projects
ReDigIm: Redistributive Imaginaries: Digitalisation, culture, and prosocial contribution (PI)
PhD-Students
Roman Olshevskiy, Politicized Masculinity: Self-Improvement Lifestyles and Political Imagination among European Young Men (working title)
Dafina Gashi, Exploring the Interplay Between Movement, Neoliberalism, and Gender in Kosovo (working title)
Second supervisor
Ćurak Hana (first supervisor: Silvy Chakkalakal, University of Zurich)
Frank Cora (first supervisor: Friedemann Kreuder, JGU Mainz)
Karavasilev Kostadin (first supervisor: Prof. Dr. Dorothea Schulz, Münster University)
Kiščenko Diana (first supervisor: Prof. Dr. Klavs Sedlenieks, Riga Stradins University)
Püsök Imola (first supervisor: Prof. Dr. Regina Bendix, University of Goettingen, Prof. Dr. Victoria Hegner, University of Jena)
Saylak Şeyma (first supervisor: Prof. Dr. Sabine Hess, University of Goettingen)
Teaching in SoSe 2024
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VL. Grundlagen der Kulturanthropologie/Europäischen Ethnologie (Winter)
Instructor: Reza Bayat; Univ.-Prof. Dr. Carna Brkovic
WiSe 2024/25