Ivana Maček
Ivana Maček

Telephone: +46 (0)8 674 75 36
E-mail: ivana.macek@socant.su.se
Room: B636
Office hours: By appointment

Ivana Maček is Senior Lecturer of Social Anthropology at Stockholm University (since January 2014). She has studied ethnology, history of art, and theoretical mathematics at Zagreb University, Croatia, before coming to Uppsala, Sweden in 1990 where she studied cultural anthropology and african studies, and received her PhD in cultural anthropology in 2000. She worked as post-doctoral researcher at Uppsala University, Programme for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, between 2000 and 2003. In 2003 she took position as Senior Lecturer in Genocide Studies at the same Programme (today, The Hugo Valentin Centre), and has been director of its Master Programme between 2010 and 2014. In 2009 she was titled Associate Professor at Uppsala University, and in 2010 she became Licensed Clinical Psychotherapist by Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare.

Research

Maček’s research interests are in the field of anthropology of war and mass political violence, anthropological methods, and recently also psychological anthropology. Her regional expertise is in Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as Sweden, and currently also in the transnational movement of Swedish professionals as well as second generation immigrants, a movement that is geopolitical, socio-cultural, and psychological. She has conducted two larger projects, financed by Swedish Research Councils (FRN and FAS), and has received funding for the current three year project (by RJ) that has started in January 2013. “Belonging in Bosnia. Cultural Dynamic of Collective Identities in the Context of 'Dirty War'” was the first of these research projects. It was conducted during the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and resulted in a PhD dissertation in 2000, a number of internationally published articles and chapters, and finally also in an internationally published monograph Sarajevo Under Siege: Anthropology in Wartime (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009). The second project “Between War and Peace –A Qualitative Study of Swedish Experiences of Work in War-Zones,” was about the Swedish professionals and the process of choosing to take an assignment in a warzone, experiences in the field (with focus on violence and nature of relations to the local population and culture), and the experience of the return to the more peaceful Sweden. The current project, “Intergenerational Transmission of War Experiences among Bosnians in Sweden –A Study in Psychological Anthropology,” is situated within psychological anthropology where it aims at developing new methods. A book manuscript about how psychodynamic theories and methods can be integrated into anthropological theorizing, methods, and practice is a part of this project.

Teaching

  • Politics, Conflict and Transnationalism (undergraduate course)
  • Current Debates in Social Anthropology (undergraduate course)
  • Fieldwork course (undergraduate level)
  • Supervision of Master Thesis within the current research project
  • Supervision of PhD students

Selected publications

2020

2018

2017

  • ”Communicating the unthinkable: a psychodynamic perspective,” in Fazil Moradi, Ralph Buchenhorst, and Maria Six-Hohenbalken (eds) Memory and Genocide: On What Remains and the Possibility of Representation. Routledge.
  • “’It starts to burn a little’: Intergenerational transmission of experiences of war within a Bosnian Family in Sweden,” Oral History Forum d’histoire orale, 37, 2017, Special Issue on Generations and Memory: Continuity and Change.

2016

2015

2014

  • Engaging Violence: Trauma, Memory, and Representation, Ivana Maček (ed.). Routledge.
  • “Making Involuntary Choices, Imagining Genocide, and Recovering Trust,” in Ivana Maček (ed.) Engaging Violence: Trauma, Memory, and Representation. Routledge.
  • “Engaging Violence: Trauma, Self-Reflection, and Knowledge,” in Ivana Maček (ed.) Engaging Violence: Trauma, Memory, and Representation. Routledge.

2013

2009

2008

2007

2005

2001

2000

Lectures, seminars

2014

  • Presentation of the book “Engaging Violence: Trauma, memory, and representation” for researchers at the Department of Social Anthropology, Stockholm University, May 19.
  • Presentation of the book “Engaging Violence: Trauma, memory, and representation” for researchers at Hugo Valentin Centrum, Uppsala University, June 3.
  • Research seminar “Communicating the Unthinkable - A Psychodynamic Perspective”, Department of Social Anthropology, Stockholm University, November 17.

Membership on boards

Service to the profession

2014

  • External examiner for the PhD thesis “Intergenerational transmission of traumatic experience in the families of war survivors from Bosnia and Herzegovina” by Kalina Georgieva Yordanova, University College London (UCL), UK, May 8.
  • Reviewer for peer-review journals Political Psychology, Transcultural Psychiatry, Conflict and Society, and Cultural Anthropology.

Conferences, workshops

2014

  • Presenting “Communicating the Unthinkable - A Psychodynamic Perspective” at the international conference “Surviving genocide: on what remains and the possibility of representation”, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle, Germany, December 10-13.