Deana Jovanović is a Social Anthropologist (PhD, University of Manchester) who studies how individuals and societies shape and contest futures and how such acts orient our present, especially in late-industrial urban environments. Deana is an Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Utrecht University.

Her expertise lies in the urban and industrial transformations of towns shaped by environmental and infrastructural struggles within the global landscapes of capitalism. Her research is based on more than a decade of ethnographic fieldwork in late-industrial urban settings across the post-Yugoslav region, with a focus on Serbia. She combines political anthropology and post-socialist studies to theorize about temporalities and the (re)production of power. Her work contributes to a deeper understanding of how future-making is experienced in late-industrial (post-socialist) contexts, and how contemporary configurations of power shape everyday life within them. Overall, her research could be roughly divided in three research strands that explore the mundane future-making practices that unravel their  material, social, political, and temporal consequences: 1) performing the futures, 2) toxicity and futures and 3) infrastructural lives.

Deana’s research, and her first recently published book “Staging the Promises: Everyday Future-Making in a Serbian Industrial Town” (Cornell University Press, 2024), focuses on how promises are acted upon and performed, and how such acts intersect with the production of various forms of power. She explores how these performances are enacted onto diverse material sites of political, social, and economic contention—such as heating and electricity infrastructures, urban spaces, labor regimes, unemployment, promises of mineral extraction, and polluted bodies and air. With her work Deana contributes to the research group Sovereignty and Social Contestation (SoSCo) at Cultural Anthropology department at Utrecht University. 

Before joining Utrecht University, Deana held various postdoctoral positions: DAAD-Leibniz Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies (IOS) in Regensburg (Germany) (2018), Sociological Review Postdoctoral Fellowship at Keele University (UK) (2017/18), Visiting Senior Research Fellowship at the School of Environment, Education and Development (SEED) at University of Manchester (2018), and Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the Centre for Advanced Studies at the University of Rijeka (Croatia) (2017). Deana also worked as Research Associate at the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory (University of Belgrade) in Serbia.

Deana’s areas of expertise (and supervision) is broadly in the following fields: anthropology of futures, anthropology of the state, urban infrastructures, anthropology of industry, mining and deindustrialization, post-socialist transformations, industrial towns and urban spaces, environment and risk, feminist theory and gender.