Deana's book “Staging the promises: Everyday Future-Making in an Industrial Town in Serbia” (Cornell University Press, 2025) reveals how inhabitants of Bor, a Serbian copper-processing and mining town that lived through prosperous Yugoslav times and a post-socialist decline, were the audience theatrically performed promises of aspirational futures. Deana chronicles the efforts of the copper-processing company and the town's authorities to theatrically perform promises of better economic, urban, environmental, infrastructural and post-industrial futures. Her book asks: What impact did the staging of promises have on the residents? What temporal, material, and political effects did these performances generate? How did they shape the citizens' futures and their present?

Jovanović offers many ethnographic examples of ambivalence in people's orientation to their futures, while residents balanced hope with despair, disillusionment, and dismay. Staging the Promises highlights how the performances shaped the present, and how, in a Gramscian twist, they sustained hope alongside power dynamics that residents often criticized. It assesses the performative ways through which contemporary capitalist futures are remade. For Jovanović, Bor represents a site that reflects a current global trend: staging the promises of enhanced futures today play a significant role in contemporary populist politics. Through them, she argues, distant futures become gradually withdrawn from people's horizons.

This book provides new insights in anthropology as it shifts the focus of the literature on post-socialism from a dominant focus on studying the past and nostalgia to exploring futures. It also brings to the fore how the futures are enacted and performed or even sometimes faked, the dimensions of everyday life that have not been studied in detail in anthropology so far. The book addresses a diverse audience keen on comprehending the impacts of populist promises on our collective futures. It offers ethnographically nuanced studies on the future and the everyday and places a spotlight on the pivotal role of performative acts in shaping future promises and their impact on people's lives and the present. By emphasizing the often-overlooked performative dimensions of future-making, it contributes to the evolving field of the anthropology of the future.

Deana also explores citizenship in the context of environmental struggle in different post-Yugoslav polluted industrial towns, which has been, so far, insufficiently ethnographically explored. In addition, she explores the material side of the intersection between the futures, the state and the market by looking at how people live with electricity, district heating, and sewage systems. Currently, she is focusing on burning matters around social disputes in the former Yugoslav region that relate to urban infrastructures, by exploring access to citizenship through pipes, taps and valves within the context of global inequalities.

She is also publicly engaged in addressing issues of global academic precarity. In 2018 she published an article “Engaging with precarity: the fatiguing job seeking journey of an early career anthropologist” (Revista de Dialectología y Tradiciones Populares 73(1), 33-38).