Dr. Tanja Višić

About

I am a social and cultural anthropologist researching on labour, mobility and migration issues. I earned my PhD at the Max Weber Center for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies (Max-Weber-Kolleg der Universität Erfurt) with the thesis Peripheral labour mobilities: An ethnography of elder care work between the Former Yugoslavia and Germany. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, the thesis depicts the pattern of gendered mobility for labour, working and living arrangements and specific experiences that transform the lives of live-in elder care workers who commute between the former Yugoslavia countries and German households. The thesis is published by Campus Verlag in 2022.

Current research project

Currently, I am a member of the research team in the joint research project "(Re)moving ties: relatedness in contemporary mobile work regimes" at Rīga Stradiņš University in Latvia.

Research Project (2022)

Academic Regimes of (Im)Mobilities
Intersectional Inequalities in the Life Course of Academics (Social Sciences and Humanities) in Germany

Higher education policies and scholarly literature on academic careers and mobility in science valorise mobility as a positive force, enabling excellent research based on international networks in competitive science fields. Academic mobility is seen as an asset and prerequisite for individual careers. Thereby the notion of borderless occupational mobility as a universal value is prevalent, seen as a privilege and personal choice. My present project challenges such epistemological certainties by engaging with academic mobility from the actors' perspective and drawing on concepts from the cultural anthropological mobility studies field. This project sets out to bring to the fore the often neglected instability and personal costs of movements, as well as aspects of being immobile/immobilised. To date, there is scarce (ethnographic) research that illuminates the multifaceted experiences of scientists in their "mobile life careers" or explores the various ways in which opportunities differ for individuals to subject themselves to the roles of mobile scholars at different career stages. To fill this gap, the research project asks how temporal and spatial aspects of career demands in the academic life-career impact decisions in the process of (im)mobility and how the various conditions encourage or hinder this process. Using an analytical framework, coined as “academic regimes of (im)mobility”, the project aims to reveal how academic movements are governed by a set of rules, norms, budgeting plans, programs, and decision‐making procedures in academia. These all produce the socio-material conditions for (im)mobility, create and sustain conditions of inclusion-exclusion, discrimination and marginalization based on compounding differences in gender, citizenship, nationality, race, class, sexuality, ethnicity, religion and dis/ability. Based on biographical interviews with academic professionals (from early to senior academics), the results of research will advance the understanding of connections between a presupposed normativity of mobile careers and the wide range of diversified positions of mobile academics, their experiences, and inequalities in access to mobility as well as immobility as a result of disruptions in their lives and careers.

Foregrounding the complexity and unpredictability of life courses of academics, this research project allows for a deeper insight into the complex picture of both social conditions and constraining structures of the career mobility trajectories of academics exposing the way academic subjectivities are produced through unequal spatial and temporal (political, economic, and social) conditions. The nuanced knowledge produced will advance scholarship on anthropology of work, higher education studies, border studies, migration and mobility.

Areas of Expertise and Interest

• Mobile life-careers
• Care work
• Transnationalism
• Gender and studies of intersectionality
• Anthropology of labour and organisation
• Theories of social inequality
• Higher education studies (Academia)
• Biographical and Ethnographic Methods

Courses (Summer Term 2024)

Mobility and Migration studies
Methodologies of Mobilities

Research Fellowships and Awards

• 2021-2022 Fritz-Thyssen-Stiftung Postdoc Fellowship
• 2022 Fritz and Helga Exner Foundation Dissertation Prize in the field of Southeastern Europe research
• 2022 Georg R. Schroubek Dissertation Prize for outstanding dissertations primarily in the field of folklore and European ethnology
• 2022 Georg R. Schroubek Foundation Dissertation Printing Grant

Publications

Višić Tanja, 2022. Peripheral labour mobilities: Elder care work between the former Yugoslavia and Germany. Frankfurt:New York, Campus Verlag.

Višić, Tanja, Poleti, Dunja, 2018. “Gender and migration re-visited: Production of knowledge and feminism (in) between semi-periphery and the core, Journal Sociologija, Vol 60 -2018, Issue 1 (peer-reviewed)

Višić Tanja, 2013. "National Population Policy and Construction of Motherhood in Post-socialist Serbia", in ed. Ana Vilenica, Becoming a Mother in Neoliberal Capitalism, Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, Southeast Europe, Serbia,

Academic research networks and memberships

• Research network “Mobile Professionals and families” Tampere University, Finland
• German Society for Cultural Analysis and European Ethnology
• Anthropology of Labour Network (AoL)
• The European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA)
• Anthropology and Mobility Network (ANTHROMOB)
• International Migration Research Network (IMISCOE)