Astrea Nikolovska (née Pejović), Ph.D.  Department of Mobility and Migration ERC Memory and Populism from Below Research Affiliate Email: nikolovska@eu.cas.cz Address: Na Florenci 3, 110 00 Prague 1, Czechia  ORCID, Academia.edu, ResearchGate, LinkedIn

QUALIFICATIONS

2024    Ph.D., Sociology and Social Anthropology, Central European University, Vienna
2004    M.A., Sociology and Social Anthropology, Central European University, Budapest
2001    M.A., Cultural Studies, Faculty of Political Sciences, University of Belgrade

PRINCIPAL RESEARCH INTERESTS

Anthropology of War and Victimhood; Anthropology of Violence; Anthropology of Transitional Justice; Memory Studies, Populism; Liberalism and Counter Liberal Movements; Cold War Legacies; Anthropology of Haunting; Western Balkans

RESEARCH PROFILE

My dominant research interest ordinates around the question how memory of violence and victimhood are mobilized within post-conflict societies. My primary focus is on victims situated on the side of the designated perpetrators, and their struggle to claim recognition within a society that is expected to reckon with its own responsibility for war crimes through mechanisms of transitional justice. My ethnographic work is based in the Western Balkans, where I have been tracing the rise and fall of the liberal memory regime and examining how political actors, institutions, and grassroots movements mobilize alternative forms of evidence, affect, and narrative to challenge dominant representations of guilt and accountability.

More broadly, I am interested in how new right and populist movements construct truth and legitimacy in opposition to liberal epistemologies and norms. This includes exploring how disqualified, conspiratorial, or affective forms of evidence are mobilized to contest institutionalized regimes of knowledge and justice. My work investigates this tension between liberal and illiberal truth practices, and how it plays out in symbolic, legal, and embodied registers, from the politicization of scientific uncertainty to the reconfiguration of moral authority in post-conflict societies. I am particularly interested in the politics of visibility and invisibility, looking into how certain experiences and claims to victimhood remain illegible within dominant truth regimes, and how the invisible acquires social and material presence through affect, rumours, bodily manifestations, and public spectacles.

This long-term research into contested memory and regimes of visibility has increasingly drawn my attention to ghosts. I am particularly interested in how ghost stories emerge in societies whose dominant cosmologies do not formally accommodate spectral beings, but where they are nevertheless invented vernacularly, as a way of grappling with unresolved violence or historical erasure. I am currently broadening my interest to anthropology of haunting and ghosts as a medium through which the invisible is made perceptible, and the denied made possible.