Dr Matthew Porges; Visiting Fellowship 2022/23
I am a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre on Migration, Policy, and Society (COMPAS), University of Oxford. My current research explores political discourses around mobility and migration in post-Yugoslav space, with a particular emphasis on activism and political aspiration. In support of this project, I am carrying out ethnographic fieldwork, primarily in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Through an analysis of the legacies of various regionalist projects, including but not limited to Yugoslavia, I attempt to understand how political organising makes use of historical contexts and integrates constructions of the past into contemporary debates.
I graduated from the University of St Andrews with a PhD in Social Anthropology in 2021. My previous research explored similar thematic material in the context of mobility in North Africa and the Northwestern Sahara.
Visiting Fellowship October-December 2022
My visit to INZ will coincide with ongoing fieldwork in Ljubljana and elsewhere in the region. Alongside primary ethnographic research, I will carry out secondary work at the library of the Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova (+MSUM). I will also prepare a field report for the European Research Council-funded project on Emptiness, based at COMPAS. The main objectives of my stay in Ljubljana are to 1) collect ethnographic data for my primary research project, and 2) build lasting individual and institutional collaborations with scholars in Slovenia and elsewhere.
More information is available at https://www.compas.ox.ac.uk/people/matthew-porges/. I am also active on Twitter @matthew_porges.
