Prof. Dr. Čarna Brković
SIEF President
carna.brkovic(at)uni-mainz.de
Institution: University of Mainz
Čarna Brković (pronounced as Charna Brkovitj) is Professor of Cultural Studies / European Ethnology at the University of Mainz. She is the Principal Investigator of the ERC Consolidator Project “Racial Socialism. Racialization and Value in Socialist Red Cross Societies” (2026-2031). She holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Manchester and a Graduate Degree in Ethnology and Anthropology from the University of Belgrade. In the winter semester of 2024, she was a Visiting Fellow at Harvard University’s Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies. Between 2023 and 2025, she served as a Principal Investigator on the CHANSE-funded research project ReDigIm, which studied new redistributive imaginaries in Europe. In 2015, Čarna won the SIEF Young Scholar Prize.
She has published books “Realigning Humanitarianism in the Balkans: From Cold War Politics to Neoliberal Ethics” (Indiana University Press, 2026) and “Managing Ambiguity: How Clientelism, Citizenship, and Power Shape Personhood in Bosnia and Herzegovina” (Berghahn, 2017), as well as peer-reviewed articles focusing on humanitarianism, freedom and activism, favours, ethnological and anthropological epistemologies, refugee camps, and gender & sexuality. She co-curated a conversation on peer review for the POLAR journal and serves as a co-editor of “Comparative Southeast European Studies”.
A thread connecting Čarna’s work across diverse topics is her approach to thinking about Europe from its southeastern peripheries. She examines how people help one another in times of crisis; 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.
Čarna’s decentered perspective on Europe entails a critical engagement with conventional notions of Europeanization as a one-way flow of knowledge from West to East. At the same time, she resists romanticizing the local and the vernacular in the East as inherently desirable alternatives. Instead, she critically interrogates both ‘Western’ and ‘Eastern’ humanitarian formations, advocating a nuanced analytical engagement with the political heritage of socialism and a re-examination of how people in Europe care for themselves and others. Her work emphasizes multivocality and social complexity while making visible the political-economic inequalities and hierarchies that shape these dynamics
Čarna’s teaching is deeply informed by her studies in ethnology and anthropology across multiple countries and languages. She is committed to research-based teaching and to fostering the internationalization of ethnology and anthropology curricula.
Election statement:
As a member of the SIEF Executive Board since 2021, and a SIEF member since 2015, I am deeply honored by the possibility to continue contributing to the life of our scholarly society. The historical moment we are living through continues to pose various challenges to SIEF. The so-called “end of the end of history” – marked by wars and ethnic cleansing, the rise of the far right, the erosion of (neo)liberal hegemony, and the dismantling of DEI initiatives at universities – invites us all to reflect on the role that scholars and teachers of ethnology & folklore have, and ought to have, in this changing world.
I deeply appreciate SIEF as a platform for connecting with fellow scholars across state borders and disciplinary boundaries. As members of the previous Presidency have noted – perhaps the most important part of SIEF’s name is “&” – signifying the act of bringing together notions, things, people, and places across hierarchically ordered differences.
Should the General Assembly choose to elect me as president, I will continue working to make SIEF a vibrant, diverse, inclusive and solidary platform for scholarly exchange.
Website: https://kultur.ftmk.uni-mainz.de/en/brkovic/ / https://carnabrkovic.net/
Social media: https://bsky.app/profile/charnab.bsky.social
SIEF Directory: https://www.siefhome.org/members/sief/19139
