Published Works
“State of the Field” features the scholarship of up-and-coming anthropologists working from and with underrepresented communities to push the boundaries of anthropological theory in North America (broadly defined) today. Published as a Special Issue in the Journal for the Anthropology of North America (2021), I edited this collection alongside co-editor Ruth Gomberg-Munoz.
My book features Bosnian women refugees’ efforts to remake their lives, after war, in Chicago. The book follows these diasporic women from Chicago to a small town in Bosnia, to Washington D.C., to the Internet, and back to Chicago. You can read more about the book, and learn how to get your copy here.
This short book chapter explores the intergenerational impacts of refugee migration from the perspective of a teenaged Bosnian girl and is based on my volunteer experience with a youth program at a refugee agency in Chicago.
In our chapter my co-author Renia Ehrenfeucht and I ask: What happens when cities attempt to formalize informal street food vending in already overly-surveilled neighborhoods? We participated in 32 New Orleans second line parades—traditional African American street parades sponsored by neighborhood-based Social Aid & Pleasure Clubs to commemorate recently deceased community members—to find out.
Coffee has a long and storied history in the former Yugoslavia with its capacity to stimulate the senses and sociality documented as early as the fifteenth century during the Ottoman era, into the Austro-Hungarian period, and in the twentieth century successor states. This book chapter examines coffee drinking traditions associated in particular with Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) through ethnographic research conducted in Bosnia and among the refugee diaspora of 1990s political violence.
This article discusses efforts to remove four monuments celebrating the Confederacy and racial segregation leading up to the city of New Orleans’ Tricentennial celebration in 2018. Images of the monuments provided a shared language among removal proponents and opponents alike, and show how longstanding demands by activists that the monuments removal be tied to municipal-level policies addressing present-day inequities were largely erased as city officials sought to locate the monuments’ offensive symbolism in a racist past.
This book chapter traces the connections between a refugee family in Chicago and their relatives who remained in Bosnia-Herzegovina through investments in a car and building materials. It shows how these investments are shaped by family relationships and by stalled governance and high unemployment made worse by the Dayton Peace Agreement (DPA) in Bosnia and the aftermath of the 2008 global economic recession.
If you need access to articles behind paywalls, please feel free to contact me.
Ćejf (pron. “cheyf”) is a Balkan concept for experiencing time and space that is sometimes translated as “enjoyment without hurrying,” and as an individual, rather than a collective, experience, although any translations given to me began with the disclaimer that there is no comparable English concept. “Who Has Time for Ćejf?” is the title of this article in which I draw on different ways of preparing and drinking coffee, including coffee drinking as connected with diverse senses of time, to foreground Bosnian refugee women’s experiences of their post-war and migration circumstances in Chicago. I explore how Bosnian coffee as a valued form of “slow coffee” shines a light on women’s efforts to build social networks and livelihoods in the city.