About

Professor of Cultural Studies and European Ethnology, University of Mainz, Germany

Email: carna.brkovic[at]uni-mainz.de

Profile

My name is Čarna Brković (pronounced as Charna Brkovitj). I am a cultural anthropologist and Professor of Cultural Studies and European Ethnology at the University of Mainz. I am the Principal Investigator of the ERC Consolidator Project titled Racial Socialism. Racialization and Value in Socialist Red Cross Societies.

In the winter semester of 2024, I was a Visiting Fellow at Harvard University’s Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies. Between 2023 and 2025, I was a PI on a CHANSE-funded research project ReDigIm, studying new redistributive imaginaries in Europe.

My book, Realigning Humanitarianism in the Balkans: From Cold War Politics to Neoliberal Ethics (Indiana University Press, 2026), examines how the fall of socialism changed humanitarianism in the Balkan region, beginning with the work of the Yugoslav Red Cross within the Non-Aligned Movement in the 1970s and continuing with work in Montenegro by local organizations in a refugee camp between 2000 and 2018.

My first monograph Managing Ambiguity (Berghahn, 2017) is an ethnographic study of how neoliberal reforms in healthcare and social welfare in Bosnia and Herzegovina encouraged clientelism. In the book, I show how the neoliberal emphasis on local community and self-responsibility was translated into clientelist modes of relating and back. I also ethnographically trace how some people managed to get into official political positions by managing ambiguity between social welfare as a civic right and a personal gift. It is based on my 2012 PhD in Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester.

My research was published in peer-reviewed articles focusing on humanitarianism (Humanity, Ethnos; Focaal, Social Anthropology), freedom and activism (Social Anthropology), favors (Social Anthropology, Focaal), anthropological epistemology (Anthropological Theory, HAU), refugee camps (COMPSEES), and gender (COMPSEES). I co-curated a conversation on peer review for the POLAR journal and serve as a co-editor at Comparative Southeast European Studies.

A thread connecting my work across diverse topics is thinking about Europe from its southeastern peripheries. I examine the cultural, social, political, and economic forces that compel people to help one another in particular ways; what makes certain ways of relating to others meaningful and sensible; and how the fall of socialism redrew the boundaries of aid communities in ways that have since been forgotten. I work towards transforming cultural anthropology into a decentered global discipline. This is reflected in my service roles:

Research Interests and PhD supervision

  • historical anthropology of socialism
  • humanitarianism, borders, refugee camps
  • nationalism, the state, policy
  • race, gender, class
  • Europeanization
  • political imagination, activism, citizenship
  • histories of ethnology and anthropology
  • Germany, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Europe

I supervise doctoral students studying political imagination after the fall of socialism in Europe and elsewhere, especially in humanitarianism, activism, gender, and sexuality.