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