Stef Jansen is a social anthropologist whose research attempts to develop a critique of 'home' with regard to nation, place and state transformation, on the postsocialist intersections of hope and (be)longing. In addition to this anthropological research, which, since 1996, involved an ongoing series of long-term fieldwork periods in Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, he has worked for shorter periods as an activist in refugee and return projects in those countries as well as in Kosovo and Macedonia. He teaches at the University of Manchester (UK), where he is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology. Before that he taught at the University of Hull (UK), where he also gained his Doctorate and his MA. Prior to that he studied Sociology of Culture at the University of Leuven (B).
In his current research, he is exploring the feasibility of placing 'hope'—people's engagements with possible futures—at the centre of an anthropological analysis of 'home' and social transformation. This involves two related projects. Firstly, based on research in a Sarajevo suburb, he is investigating how 'the state' is brought into being (or not) through interaction between its subjects and its most localised institutional levels in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Secondly, a three-year ethnographic project with two PhD researchers traces transformations of home and hope in the everyday lives of people at borders of different levels (inter-entity, state, EU) in Bosnia-Herzegovina. All this is inspired by earlier ethnographic investigations of experiences of 'home' amongst displaced persons in Bosnia-Herzegovina itself and amongst refugees in Serbia, the Netherlands and Australia. His doctoral study of post-Yugoslav antinationalism (1996-8) investigated the experiences of persons in the Serbian and Croatian capitals who defied national homogenisation and the nationalisms that claimed to represent them.
In addition to two books, Antinacionalizam: etnografija otpora u Zagrebu i Beogradu (Beograd: XX Vek, 2005) and Struggles for home: violence, hope and the movement of people (Oxford: Berghahn, 2008, co-edited with Staffan Löfving), he has published numerous articles and book chapters on topics such as home and hope, displacement and entrapment in place, postsocialist transformations, masculinity, (anti)nationalism and everyday configurations of nationality, resistance and compliance, contested and marginalised remembering and forgetting, etc.
For a list of publications, including some full text PDF files, please see:www.socialsciences.manchester.ac.uk/disciplines/socialanthropology/about/staff/jansen/