Langugae SWITCH
For several years, Valentina Gulin Zrnić supervised the doctoral research of Iva Grubiša, who successfully defended her PhD dissertation, Making Home: Contemporary Refugee Experiences in the City of Zagreb, on 13th of May 2026 at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb. By guiding the doctoral candidate towards the concepts of futurity and temporality and encouraging an experimental approach to writing about experiences of temporal non-linearity, the dissertation builds upon themes from the anthropology of refuge, migration anthropology, and urban anthropology, extending them through the anthropology of the future. It is based on extensive and demanding ethnographic fieldwork conducted with asylum seekers and refugees living in Zagreb.
Our sincere congratulations on the successful defence!
Dr Iva Grubiša is an Assistant Researcher at the Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, and a member of the research project Transforming the Post-Industrial City: Space, Community and Work.
From the PostCity project website:
Iva Grubiša’s doctoral dissertation examines the ways in which refugees create everyday life and a sense of home in the city of Zagreb. Within the framework of the PostCity project, the dissertation explores questions of urban refuge and the attempts to create and imagine home in the context of disruption, adaptation, and uncertainty that characterise refugee biographies. Through the concept of the “temporal vortex,” the dissertation offers an analytical approach to the layered experiences of change and temporal disorientation in conditions of forced displacement, opening an interpretative space for understanding the intertwining of past, present, and future in narratives of refugee homemaking.
