Dr. Tanja Višić

About
I am a social and cultural anthropologist conducting research on labour, mobility and migration issues. I earned my Ph.D. at the Max Weber Center for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies (Max-Weber-Kolleg der Universität Erfurt) with the thesis Peripheral labor mobilities: An ethnography of elder care work between the Former Yugoslavia and Germany. Based on ethnographic fieldwork the thesis depicts pattern of gendered mobility for labour, working and living arrangements and specific experiences that transform lives of live-in elder care workers who commute between the former Yugoslavia countries and German households.
Currently, I am postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the Chair EKWEE at LMU Munich. Previously, as a Fritz-Thyssen Foundation postdoctoral fellow I was a guest researcher at the Chair for Sociology and Gender Studies at the LMU Munich.
My hobbies are hiking, wine tasting and piano playing.

Areas of Expertise and Interest
• Mobile life-careers
• Care work
• Transnationalism
• Gender and studies of intersectionality
• Anthropology of labour and organization
• Theories of social inequality
• Higher education studies (Academia)
• Biographical and Ethnographic Methods

Current Research Project
Academic Regimes of (Im)Mobilities - Intersectional Inequalities in the Life Course of Academics (Social Sciences and Humanities) in Germany

Higher education policies and scholarly literature on academic careers and mobility in science valorize it as a merely positive force, enabling excellent research based on international networks in competitive science fields. Academic mobility is seen as an asset and prerequisite for individual careers. Thereby the notion of a borderless occupational mobility as a universal value is prevalent, seen as a privilege and individual choice. The present project challenges such epistemological certainties in this field by engaging with academic mobility from the perspective of the actors and drawing on concepts from the field of cultural anthropological mobility studies. This project sets out to bring to the fore the often neglected instability and personal costs of movements, as well as aspects of being immobile/immobilized. It will be shown how academic (im)mobility is shaped by disparities of power and a sociocultural inequalities (for ex. access to mobility). To date, there is scarce (ethnographic) research that illuminates the multifaceted experiences of scientists in their "mobile life-careers" or explores the various ways in which opportunities differ for individuals to subject themselves to the roles of mobile scholars at different career stages. It raises questions about how these academic subjectivities are produced through unequal spatial and temporal (political, economic, and social) conditions. To fill this gap, the research project asks how temporal and spatial aspects of career demands in the academic life-career impact decisions in the process of (im)mobility and how the various conditions encourage or hinder this process. Using an analytical framework, coined as “academic regimes of (im)mobility”, the project intends to depict on how academic movements are governed by a set of rules, norms, budgeting plans, programs, and decision‐making procedures in academia. These all produce the socio-material conditions for (im)mobility, create and sustain conditions of inclusion-exclusion, discrimination and marginalization based on compounding differences in gender, citizenship, nationality, race, class, sexuality, ethnicity, religion and dis/ability. Based on biographical interviews with academic professionals (from early to senior academics) in the German higher education system (in social sciences and humanities), the project will advance the understanding of connections between mobility imperatives and a presupposed normativity of mobile career pathways. Foregrounding the complexity and unpredictability of life courses of academics, allows for a deeper insight into the complex picture of both social conditions and constraining structures of the career mobility trajectories of academics and how they are subjectified. The nuanced knowledge produced will advance scholarship on anthropology of work, education, border studies, migration and mobility.

Courses (Summer Term 2024)
Mobility and Migration studies
Methodologies of Mobilities

Research Fellowships and Awards
2021 - 2022 Fritz-Thyssen-Stiftung Postdoc Fellowship
2022 Fritz and Helga Exner Foundation Dissertation Prize in the field of Southeastern Europe research
2022 Georg R. Schroubek Dissertation Prize for outstanding dissertations primarily in the field of folklore and European ethnology
2022 Georg R. Schroubek Foundation Dissertation Printing Grant

Publications
Višić Tanja, 2022. Peripheral labour mobilities: Elder care work between the former Yugoslavia and Germany. Frankfurt: New York, Campus Verlag 
Višić, Tanja, Poleti, Dunja, 2018. “Gender and migration re-visited: Production of knowledge and feminism (in) between semi-periphery and the core", Journal Sociologija, Vol 60 -2018, Issue 1 
Višić Tanja, 2013. “National Population Policy and Construction of Motherhood in Post-socialist Serbia”, in ed. Ana Vilenica, Becoming a Mother in Neoliberal Capitalism, Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, Southeast Europe, Serbia

Academic research networks and memberships
Research network “Mobile Professionals and families” Tampere University, Finland
German Society for Cultural Analysis and European Ethnology
Anthropology of Labour Network (AoL)
The European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA)
Anthropology and Mobility Network (ANTHROMOB)
International Migration Research Network (IMISCOE)