Hromadžić wins Title VIII grant for research in Bosnia-Herzegovina
Azra Hromadžić, an associate professor of
anthropology and O’Hanley Faculty Scholar, has been awarded $8,000 through a
Title VIII Scholars appointment by the American Councils for International
Education.
This
award will support Hromadžić over three months of research into riverine
citizenship, political imagination, and the struggle for water in postwar
Bosnia-Herzegovina. The project will build on her 2017,
Fulbright-sponsored visit to Bosnia and Herzegovina, during which she conducted
interviews in the northwestern town of Bihać and
discovered that its citizens frequently spoke of their water — its uniqueness,
abundance, shortages, quality, materiality, infrastructure, and value. Two
years earlier, Bihać had been the site of a political protest, when thousands
of people objected to their city’s decision to allow construction of a dam on
the river Una. Armed with a love for the river, the citizens exercised newfound
political agency and pressured the city’s government into reversing its plan (the
only reversal of a city government’s decision, on any matter, in the nation’s
postwar history). Hromadžić’s new
project, examining water as a site of vital politics in the Balkans, emerged
from this moment when the political rule stumbled.
Hromadžić, who joined Maxwell in 2010, is a
political anthropologist whose research focuses on questions of ethno-political
violence, post-conflict reconciliation, post-socialism, care, and water
politics, among others topics. Hromadžić’s first book, Citizens of an Empty Nation (University of Pennsylvania Press,
2015), examines how mandated reunification in postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina was
experienced by youths as they came of age in the country by discussing the
conflicts and contradictions entailed by postwar state-making.
01/30/20