Maja Povrzanović Frykman

Biography

Maja Povrzanović Frykman (ORCID: 0000-0001-9621-6751) is Professor of Ethnology and a senior lecturer at the Department of Global Political Studies at Malmö University, Sweden. She is also participating in research projects at Agderforskning, Kristiansand, Norway, teaching in the PhD programme in Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Zagreb, and coordinating the IMISCOE research group TRANSMIG - Transnational Practices in Migration.
Maja Povrzanović Frykman received her PhD in Ethnology at Zagreb University in 1997. As the recipient of Swedish Institute and STINT scholarships, she was affiliated to Lund University, where she also conducted her first project funded by The Swedish Research Council. Since 2001, she has been employed as research fellow to the Willy Brandt Guest Professors in IMER and as a senior lecturer in Peace and Conflict Studies at Malmö University. She received a docentship in the field of International Migration and Ethnic Relations in 2005 and has supervised PhD students at the universities of Lund, Linköping, Zagreb and Malmö.
Based on previous work undertaken at the Zagreb Institute for Ethnology and Folklore Research, her main areas of research include war-related experiences, as presented in the dissertation Culture and Fear: Wartime Everyday life in Croatia 1991-92 as well as in a number of subsequent publications, including the edited collection War, Exile, Everyday Life, articles in Current Anthropology, Ethnologia Europaea, Ethnologie Française, and chapters in the Greenwood collection Daily Lives of Civilians in Wartime Twentieth-Century Europe and in Blackwell Companion to the Anthropology of Europe.
Theoretical interest in place and identity enabled her to connect war-related research with concepts and practices in the domains of diaspora and transnationalism. Her research on intra-ethnic differences between labour- and refugee-migrants from Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina resulted in edited collections Beyond Integration: Challenges of Belonging in Diaspora and Exile and Transnational Spaces: Disciplinary Perspectives, chapters in the Ashgate book The Bosnian Diaspora, the Routledge book New Approaches to Migration? Transnational communities and the transformation of home and articles published in a number of international journals.
Her recently concluded projects dealt with the material practices of migrants and the well-being of highly skilled labour migrants. She currently participates in projects ‘Exploring Integration as Emplaced Practice’ (RFFAGDER, Agderforskning), and ‘Museums as Arenas for Integration – New Perspectives and Methods of Inclusion’ (AMIF, Malmö University).
Her recent publications include two co-edited volumes: Sensitive Objects: Affect and Material Culture (Nordic Academic Press) and Migration, Transnationalism and Development in South-East Europe and the Black Sea Region (Routledge).
Maja Povrzanović Frykman has peer-reviewed articles for international journals and evaluated projects for several research councils as well as for the European Commission's Research Executive Agency. She has also served as a member of the board of Nordic Migration Research organisation and is currently a member of the Croatian Science Foundation’s Scientific Committee for Social Science and Humanities.

Education

PhD in Ethnology, University of Zagreb, Croatia, 1997

Areas of Research / Professional Expertise

war-related experiences; refugee- and labour migration; diaspora; transnational practices; highly skilled migrants; place; ethnicity; affect; material culture

Books