Igor PetricevicPhD student
About me
Igor Petričević is a PhD candidate at the Department of Social Anthropology with an interest in urban anthropology, anthropology of migration and anthropology of crisis.
After finishing his BA in Sociology and Anthropology (2009-2012) at the University of Zagreb, Croatia, he received his MSc in Social and Cultural Anthropology (2013-2015) at the University of Leuven in Belgium with the thesis: “Navigating the Crisis and Negotiating Mobility: Trajectories of Highly Educated Southern European Youth in Uncertainty”. This thesis explored the meaning-making processes accompanying mobility of young people from Greece, Spain, Portugal, Italy, and Croatia during the uncertain times of crisis and austerity on the EU’s periphery.
He also holds an MA in European Studies: Transnational and Global Perspectives (2016-2016) from the University of Leuven where he started delving into the overlaps between migratory movements on the Balkan route and memories of the 1990s war in Croatia, a topic he further explores in his doctoral research.
Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Zagreb, Croatia (2017-2019), his dissertation analyses transit, migrant emplacement and reception on the Balkan route from a relational perspective that highlights the role of space, temporality, affect, and historical context.
Teaching
Teaching:
Master's Program in Social Anthropology
2017
"Transnational Migration" (7.5 ECTS)
2018-2022
"History and Philosophy of Anthropological Theory" (15 ECTS)
Research
PhD research at Stockholm University
Feeling the Distance and Getting Closer: Migration and Precarious Emplacement in Zagreb
The territory of the Republic of Croatia has historically been a place of forced and economic migration. Its recent history is marked by 1990s refugee migrations upon the wars that followed the breakup of Yugoslavia, and the ongoing economic immigration, which only increased with the accession to the European Union in 2013 in the aftermath of the economic crisis. Parallel to the opening of its western and northern borders towards EU member states, Croatia’s eastern and southern borders have become EU’s external borders. From the 2000s onwards, these borderlands among former Yugoslav states have become sites of continuous migration of persons mainly from Middle East and Africa, and a passage that has become known as the Balkan route.
Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Zagreb between 2017 and 2019, the thesis focuses on the dynamics between transit migration and more permanent, yet precarious, forms of migrant emplacement in Croatia. To demonstrate how migratory movements are shaped by place, and vice versa, I emphasise the need to study migrant (im)mobilities and emplacement as entwined by bordering practices, as well as entangled with the localities en route, their histories and relations.
In the thesis, I describe how migrants’ trajectories meet and weave both with each other and with the spaces and people in Zagreb as the city becomes absorbed into the European border regime. I point how these both convivial and antagonistic encounters reveal resonant and contrasting histories of diversity, refugeeness and precarity. Through the concept of ‘precarious emplacements’, I highlight that precarity is a crucial aspect of migrant emplacement in Zagreb, as practices of settling, as well as social interactions with other residents which surround these, occur in conditions of uncertainty and social marginalisation. Precarity permeates both the migrants’ trajectories and the fabric of post-war and post-socialist urban spaces and relations they move through and come to inhabit.
For a processual analysis of precarious emplacement, I formulate the concept of ‘the gap’ to depict the space between persons and groups which consists of the constantly vacillating relations of distance and proximity, that is, a space of affect where difference and similarity are negotiated. The gap dynamics reveals processes of identification, boundary work and othering (such as stereotyping and racialisation) which may lead to stigmatisation, exclusion and reproduction of precarity. Using the concept of the gap, I examine how lines between different migrant and non-migrant actors are drawn, blurred, thinned, and erased at different sites in the city and relate them to practices of moving and staying in the country.