Dr Jasmin Tabakovic

I was born in Višegrad (in former Yugoslavia, currently Bosnia and Herzegovina) and grew up in Antwerp, Belgium from the age of four. I earned a Bachelor’s in Philosophy at the University of Antwerp, a Master’s in Social and Cultural Anthropology at KU Leuven—where I also worked as a teaching assistant and lecturer for over a year—and a PhD in Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge under the brilliant mentorship of Prof. Dr. Yael Navaro.

With my research, writing, and teaching, I hope to contribute to a critical, politically engaged scholarship of refusal, care, and healing amidst (genocidal) violence, both in its explicit manifestations as well as in its enduring reverberations. I am particularly interested in how we live amidst the emplaced ‘psychosocial’ disruptions and afterlives of catastrophe under negationist regimes, and how knowledge is made, unmade, and shared under the pressures of pain, dignity, and survival. Drawing on decolonial, feminist, and critical theorists, I aim to ground my work in non-extractive methodologies, critical ‘trauma’ perspectives, and a radical ethics of care and responsibility, among others.

For my doctoral research, I engaged with Bosnians of my parents’ generation forcibly exiled from Eastern Bosnia and Herzegovina during the genocidal violence of the early 1990s, now living in Belgium and the Netherlands. Rather than seeking narrative closure or linear ‘recovery,’ I followed the knottings of that violence—its re-verberations and re-iterations in memory, in the gut, in sleep, in language, in gesture, in silence—tracing how people (re)search for healing by weaving trauma psychotherapy with struna (stomach-ailment realignment), strava (fear-pouring rituals), bioenergetic healing, and more. These healing modalities fragmentarily orbited the collision of “what happened?”—a question disturbed by a genocidal logic bent on negating every trace of facticity— and “how do we live with what cannot be undone?” sutured by a shared desire for “mir u duši” (peace of soul/mind/body).

To honour the complexity and vulnerability of these encounters, I engaged in what I call an intimate fragmentary ethnography—a way of relating that resists reduction to a mere ‘methodology,’ grounded not in mastery or coherence, but in affective attunement, epistemic humility, partially shared diachronicity, and relational ethics. Situated at the intersections of psychological and political anthropology, yet also being, in a sense, indisciplinary—I was a fellow (re)searcher: a “sin” (son), a witness, a fellow exiled, sometimes a silence—refusing extractive logics of data capture and centring instead the relational labour of listening, doubting, hesitating, fearing, sorrowing, and staying. Through a semi-analytical understanding of mind–body–duša, I sought to approach dimensions of non-dualistic experience that carry both historical and metaphysical weight, and demand modes of presence rather than ‘clear’ translation.

My broader research interests are deeply animated by the uneasy, entangling relation between generalisation and singularisation—reforming these concepts experientially and analytically in light of the lived tensions amidst and after (genocidal) violence. I look at how singular lives and intimate ruptures are abstracted into ‘evidence’ for universal frameworks, thus distanced from their environed locales—an epistemic and affective violence that flattens specificity, erases opacity, and instrumentalises suffering for recognition on hegemonic terms. In parallel, I trace movements of singularisation: refusals of capture, small acts of re-embedding, and practices of care that insist on the irreducibility of lived experience, even as they remain porous and most-oft ambivalent and ambivalising in their intimately felt (un)tensing and (un)knotting.

I understand generalisation and singularisation as knotted, co-constitutive forces—forever pulling, fraying, and folding into each other. To witness, to theorise, to write, and to live are all implicated in these knots. My work dwells in their tensions—not to untangle them, but to ask what becomes possible when we resist the demand for clarity and closure. Without denying that many of us desire forms of closure, I also attune myself to the complexities, ambivalences, and politics of staying with seemingly unresolvable ruptures that persistently (re)shape our lives.

By negating negationist logics wherever they surface, I strive to research and write otherwise— creating space for different ways of knowing, feeling, and being with one another in the presence and aftermath of violently imposed ruptures. Fundamentally, I seek to carry these insights beyond ‘the Bosnian (exilic) context,’ avoiding ethnonymic reductionism and contributing to broader conversations and practices around catastrophe, care, healing, and solidarity.