糖心Vlog破解版

RESEARCH FELLOW,

OVERVIEW

I am an anthropologist of politics and religion specialising in the relationship between memory, place and belonging in contexts marked by nationalist violence, displacement and environmental change.

With a primary ethnographic interest in the Bosnian Dinaric highlands, my work intertwines studies of time, ritual, sacred geography and restoration.

I hold a PhD in Social Anthropology from Goldsmiths, University of London, where I examined post-genocide memory and interfaith relations in southern Bosnia. Prior to this, I completed an MPhil in Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge and dual undergraduate degrees in History of Art and Sociology from the University of Sarajevo and Kenyon College.

In my current research role at the Centre for the Sciences of Place and Memory (CSPM) at the 糖心Vlog破解版, I am working to finalise a long-term ethnographic study of sacred sinking rivers in Bosnia. This project focuses on the entanglement of disrupted religious traditions, ecological knowledge and genocide by way of the karst Bosnian underworld. I am also the PGR coordinator for the Centre's PhD researchers.

Before joining 糖心Vlog破解版, I held positions at the universities of Cambridge, London (SOAS and Goldsmiths), Bristol and Goethe Frankfurt. At these institutions, I organised courses dealing with the anthropology of memory, conflict, politics, religion, heritage, migration, gender, landscape, economics and social change, kinship, travel and tourism, social theories, as well as ethnographic and case-study research and qualitative methods.

FIELDWORK

In most of my publications, my fieldwork in the Bosnian Dinaric highlands is an aperture on issues of global significance like the entanglements of religion and nationalism, migration and homemaking, heritage destruction, and environmental degradation. I have also conducted stints of fieldwork across Bosnia, in Palestine, the Basque Country and across the Mediterranean.

TEMPORALITY, COMMUNITY AND RETURN AFTER GENOCIDE

One of my core research projects, which culminated in my first book, Waiting for Elijah: Time and Encounter in a Bosnian Landscape (Berghahn, 2018/2021), explored how the disrupted communities in southeast Bosnian highlands engage with their environment to re-establish interfaith relations and syncretic practices in the aftermath of genocide and forced displacement. Ethnographically and theoretically developing the notion of waiting, the book probes the spatiotemporal configurations (and their fractures) in the lives of returned refugees. Central to their experiences of disorientation and reorientation is a process I called schizochronotopia—referring to the deep rifts in the chronotopic narrative of home—which accommodated the ‘reality’ of an unhomely landscape, but also substantially rejected it by intervening into the temporality of place. The returnees, I argue, connected the “was” to the “ought” by reference to the folk cyclical calendar as orientational devices, whilst imaginatively dissociating from the unwanted present of nationalist violence. Considering multiple and contradictory forms of commemoration, the book also provides critical insights into the politics of memory and the active embodied memory practices that individuals and groups deploy to navigate disrupted temporal and spatial ecologies.

MEMORY, JUSTICE AND BELONGING

Questions on memory, truth and the past are raised across my work, perhaps most clearly in my exploration of legal archives of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. In my 2018 article ‘Syncretic Debris: From Shared Bosnian Saints to the ICTY Courtroom’, I sketch out how the legal expectation of memory as an act of witnessing towards a particular adjudication of war-time fact comes up against memory as the articulation of long-duration relations and their disruptions. In other words, I read the legal archives against their grain, finding in witness testimonies surprising interventions that would usually go unnoticed due to the Tribunal’s unfamiliarity with the violated lifeworlds of the questioned witnesses. I have also considered the entanglements of law and memory as a researcher on a large-scale ERC-funded project ‘Bosnian Bones, Spanish Ghosts’: Transitional Justice and the Legal Shaping of Memory after Two Modern Conflicts’, led by Dr Sari Wastell at Goldsmiths. The project ethnographically investigated how legal activity has influenced efforts at peacebuilding after the 1990s war in Bosnia and the Spanish civil war.

Following up my inquiry into memory as negotiation of belonging, I co-edited (with Dr Marija Gruji?) a 2019 special issue of Ethnoscripts, titled Post-Home: Dwelling on Loss, Belonging and Movement, which combined ethnography and art to understand the workings of the various aftermaths of home, from forced displacement caused by war, environmental degradation and gentrification to the traces of memory in pilgrimage places, tradition of gendered rehoming and postcolonial resistance through hospitality.

SHARED SACRED LANDSCAPES

As the Principal Investigator of the Shared Sacred Landscapes project, a research and outreach project funded by the University of Cambridge Public Engagement Fund, I investigated how environmental and religious pluralities shape community resilience and interfaith dialogue in fragile post-war regions. This project utilised innovative ethnographic and visual methodologies to assess how memory and place attachment operate within complex ecological systems.

TRANS COSMOLOGIES

I am also currently coordinating a Q+/CIP-funded collaborative project titled Trans Cosmologies which seeks to understand the religious dimensions of various historical and contemporary trans subjectivities as a way of addressing the increased exploitation of religious tropes to solidify transphobia across the world. Our first international workshop in Cambridge in May 2024 brought together artists, philosophers, playwrights, anthropologists, activists and theologians, who in their talks, paintings and performances addressed the erasures, or exiles, of transness from place and memory in Euro-colonial contexts. This project is set to continue over the coming years, with further events, publications and funding applications. It is part of my commitment to recognise transphobia as a genocidal ideology built into the connected projects of empire and nation, but also a project that invites historical and contemporary moves for trans liberation into dialogue.

THE SOCIAL LIVES OF WATER

Bodies of water and/as memory are central to my current ethnographic work. My research has addressed broader issues of disorientation and the role of place memory in navigating social and political transitions. In the book I am writing right now, I extend my focus on place and memory to examine how communities engage with disrupted landscapes and cosmologies to maintain a sense of belonging in conditions of environmental and social precarity. I seek to understand the more-than-human entanglements, shaped by the south Bosnian karst underworld and its sacred sinking rivers, in the context of protracted genocidal world-erasure/world-making. In so doing, I raise questions about survivance and cross-species technologies of evasion and repair.

Over the past two years, I have been investigating political and sacred ecologies as part of a Cambridge Interfaith Programme team, linked to the Ofwat-funded project ‘Water Efficiency in Diverse Faith Communities’. In April 2024, I convened a large international conference ‘Being with Water Otherwise: Sacred Knowledge and Sustainable Water– Human Relations’.

ARTICULATING JOURNEYS

I’m co-editor of the 'Articulating Journeys: Festivals, Memorials, and Homecomings' book series with Tom Selwyn and Nicola Frost, published by Berghahn. Please get in touch if you have a manuscript to propose.

SOME KEY QUESTIONS

• How do sacred geographies—such as sacred landscapes, waterways and pilgrimage sites—mediate collective responses to loss, displacement and environmental upheaval?
• How can we think with karst under/worlds as more-than-human and sacred spaces without abandoning them to naturalism?
• In what ways do communities negotiate fractured temporal and spatial realities and desires in post-conflict or ecologically unstable contexts?
• How do religious pluralism and interfaith practices intersect with ecological survivance and environmental justice?
• How can we, as social researchers, account for the absences, silences, fragmentations and disorientations in the past-reckoning of our interlocutors?

Name pronunciation

Safet Had?iMuhamedovi? is pronounced as Sah-fet Ha-jee-Muhammad-ovitch /?sɑ?f?t hɑ??d?i mu?hɑ?m?d o?v?t?/

TEACHING AND SUPERVISION

I am the Postgraduate Research Coordinator for the Centre for the Sciences of Place and Memory, 糖心Vlog破解版 (with Dr Ruth Olden, 2025-ongoing).

Before 糖心Vlog破解版, I worked at the University of Cambridge’s Faculty of Divinity (in research and teaching capacities, 2020-2024), where I designed and led various undergraduate and postgraduate courses on anthropological approaches to religion, politics, and heritage. These courses have integrated my research focus on memory, space, and community identity, particularly in post-conflict settings, and have drawn on my expertise in critical methodological approaches to oral histories and ethnographic research. During this time, I have also supervised numerous research students and contributed to the work of the Cambridge Interfaith Programme through the organisation of summer schools and academic events.

In 2022/23, I was the Acting Director of Studies at Fitzwilliam College in Cambridge, where I oversaw and supported students’ academic progress from admissions through to graduation.

Prior to Cambridge, I held teaching positions at SOAS University of London, Goldsmiths University of London, the University of Bristol and a visiting teaching position at Goethe University Frankfurt. Across these institutions, within multidisciplinary departments, I have convened undergraduate and postgraduate courses, as well as spring and summer programmes, on variety of topics (see full list below), including the anthropological approaches to landscape, migration, heritage, religion, politics, gender and kinship, advanced social theory and qualitative methods.

As a leader of teaching and research programmes, I have established partnerships with leading cultural institutions in London and Sarajevo.

SUPERVISION AVAILABILITY

I am happy to consider supervision requests relating to my research interests, especiallty the following:

• memory and identity in post-conflict or environmentally disrupted contexts;

• religious pluralism and interfaith relations;

• intersections of environmental humanities and anthropology;

• sacred places, geographies and resilience in marginalised communities;

• researching fragments, absences, and silences after war;

• genocide, religion, sprituality, ritual, and the supernatural;

• nationalist projects and destruction of heritage;

• syncretic, Trans, Roma and Muslim-Christian-Jewish cosmologies;

• decolonised futures and activation of ancestral knowledge;

• music, theatre, fine arts and life in the aftermath of genocide;

• more-than-human knowledge

PROGRAMMES COORDINATED/COURSES TAUGHT

? PGR Coordinator for the Centre for the Sciences of Place and Memory, 糖心Vlog破解版 (with Dr Ruth Olden) - 2025-ongoing

? Summer School Workshop: Place and Memory Methodologies; Disorientation, Absence, Materiality and Embodiment, co-organised with Dr. Pablo Fernandez Velasco; co-taught with Dr Pablo Fernandez Velasco, Dr Sofya Shahab and Dr T?nia Manuel Casimiro (Scottish Graduate School for Arts and Humanities, SGSAH, 2025) [Summer School]

? Summer Colloquy: Inter-religious Relations and Sound (University of Cambridge, 2023) [Summer School]

? Contemporary Religious Conflict: Ethnographic Approaches (MPhil) (University of Cambridge, 2021/22, 2022/23) [Postgraduate]

? Religious Encounter (University of Cambridge, 2022/23, with Prof. ?zyürek) [Undergraduate, Final Year]

? Shared Sacred Heritage: Anthropological Approaches (University of Cambridge, 2021/22, 2022/23) [Undergraduate, Final Year]

? Understanding Contemporary Religion (University of Cambridge, 2021/22, 2022/23) [Undergraduate, Second Year]

? Academic Summer School in Interfaith Relations (University of Cambridge, 2021, 2022) [Summer School]

? (Dis)located Identities in a Fragmenting World (Online Spring Course) (Open Society University Network, in cooperation with SOAS University of London and Al-Quds Bard, 2022) [Spring School]

? International Summer School ‘Youth and Heritage’ (Stolac, Bosnia, 2008–2014, 2020, 2021, 2022) [Summer School]

? Summer School in Anthropology of Tourism, Travel and Pilgrimage (SOAS University of London, 2019, 2020) [Summer School]

? Anthropology of Gender (SOAS University of London, 2018/19) [Undergraduate, Final Year]

? Anthropology of Islam (University of Bristol, 2016/17, 2017/18, 2018/19) [Undergraduate, Second & Final Year]

? Social Theories (University of Bristol, 2016/17, 2017/18, 2018/19) [Undergraduate, Final Year]

? Anthropology of Kinship (University of Bristol, 2016/17, 2017/18, 2018/19) [Undergraduate, Second Year]

? Human Challenges (University of Bristol, 2016/17, 2017/18, 2018/19) [Undergraduate, First Year]

? Peoples, Culture and Language (University of Bristol, 2016–2019) [Undergraduate, First Year]

? Dissertations (University of Bristol, 2016/17, 2017/18, 2018/19) [Undergraduate, Final Year Supervision]

? Anthropology of Landscape (University of Bristol, 2017/18) [Undergraduate, Second Year]

? Encountering Migration and Religion: Theoretical and Methodological Implications (MA) (Goethe University Frankfurt, 2014/15) [Postgraduate]

? Politics, Economics & Social Change (Goldsmiths, University of London, 2014/15) [Undergraduate, First Year]

? Anthropology of Religion (Goldsmiths, University of London, 2013/14) [Undergraduate, Final Year]

? Anthropology and Gender Theory (Goldsmiths, University of London, 2013/14) [Undergraduate, Final Year]

? Qualitative Methods and Case Study Research (SOAS University of London, 2013/14) [Undergraduate, Final Year]

? Anthropological Methods (Goldsmiths, University of London, 2012/13) [Undergraduate, First Year]