Čarna Brković has been Professor of Cultural Anthropology/European Ethnology at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz since April 2023. After completing her bachelor's degree in European Ethnology at the University of Belgrade and her doctorate in Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester, she taught at the University of Göttingen and the University of Regensburg. She was also a postdoc at the Institute for Advanced Studies at the Central European University.
Her work is composed of a focus on inequalities, power, and social complexity and ambiguity. Her main interest is developing concepts that help to understand how people with different social status in Europe pursue their projects for a good life.
She is currently finishing a book manuscript, provisionally titled "Worldmakings. Realigning Humanitarianism from Yugoslav Socialism to Neoliberal Capitalism in the Balkans". It is an account of how humanitarians in Montenegro have pursued different approaches to worldmaking within the Non-Aligned Movement and forty years later during the Europeanization process. The remaking of humanitarianism in the Balkans has meant a shift in the worldview represented by this organization, away from the imagination produced during non-alignment to that embodied in the liberal humanitarian tradition. The book explores connections between morality and imagination through the lens of local humanitarian personnel outside the West/Global North.
