My research interests include migration and mobility, civil society, governance, meanings of work, and temporality in postsocialist Eastern Europe, specifically Serbia. My master's thesis was based on fieldwork in Serbia and Greece and explored the work of historians, history teachers, and NGO employees engaged in regional initiatives to produce alternative history education materials for use in secondary schools.
My dissertation will interrogate how meanings of work and mobility are being co-constructed in relation to the politicized discourse on brain drain in Serbia. By approaching brain drain as a historically produced and actively maintained discourse—one that fundamentally informs policies, programs, and collective and individual aspirations and practices—my research seeks to trouble the aura of grim certainty conveyed by migration statistics. I hypothesize that mobility is a key vector along which responses to the disappointments of “transition” can be mapped and in relation to which the classed fracture lines around meanings of work are brought into relief. As part of my research I will map the policy world of brain drain, identify and analyze different stances toward mobility, and interrogate the ideas, values, and aspirations attached to conditions of work for Serbia’s “talent.” Attending to the conditions of possibility in which migratory decisions are made and practices patterned, my dissertation will explore how contemporary stances toward mobility articulate aspirations to dignify the conditions of life and work, are implicated in the reconfiguration of class, and are revelatory of how postsocialist subjects understand themselves and construct life projects in the context of ongoing political and socioeconomic change.