Bojana Babic

Q1. Who are you?

I am Bojana, and I come from the spaces of Ex Yugoslavia. I’ve been interested in the various issues around displacement ever since the Bosnia war. This interest brought me back to academia almost a decade ago and many education and research roads in different disciplines and countries. I’ve been particularly interested in continuing to inform my research inquiries within the economic and philosophical anthropology approach along with the multimodal ethnography of everyday life in urban environments.

Q2. What was your motivation to apply for the FFVT fellowship? Why Germany?

The excellence of this program and the possibilities it can open through the connections, knowledge and expertise it provides in the field of forced migration and refugee studies prevailed in my application for the FFVT fellowship. Along this line, Germany has always been the first choice for my academic activities, including my second master's at Oldenburg University and PhD at Humboldt University. I believe that the German academic environment offers a unique freedom in doing research which fosters creativity and originality in one work.

Q3. What do you expect from the fellowship?

I expect to engage in various inspiring and fruitful conversations which will enrich my research and encourage further collaboration around a variety of issues within the area of forced migration and refugee studies. I’m especially interested in building networks and new collective actions within FFVT networks, including joint research proposals.

Q4. What is the focus of your work, and what is innovative about it? / What are your planned outcomes and activities for the fellowship period? And how do they relate to your FFVT hosting institution/ the FFVT cooperation project?

My work has always been focused on the ethnography of the everyday life of the displaced population in the urban context of several geographic areas, primarily Istanbul, Cairo and the cities of Bosnia, along with Serbia and Croatia. There I've been collecting new information about these particular forms of life with the hope that it could not only challenge the mainstream narratives about forced migrations but also contribute to new conversations of theorising the displaced population outside of already existing categories.