Full Professor
Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences University of Zagreb
Address: Ul. Ivana Lučića 3 10000 Zagreb, CROATIA
Email: spotkonjak@m.ffzg.hr

Sanja Potkonjak graduated with a double major in Archaeology and Ethnology from the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, Croatia. She obtained her master’s degree in Gender Studies (2001) from the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary, and earned her PhD in Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology from the University of Zagreb in 2010, with a dissertation on women’s authorship in twentieth-century Croatian ethnology.

She is an ethnologist and cultural anthropologist whose teaching and research focus on qualitative methodology, ethics, and contemporary social transformations. She teaches courses in qualitative methods and research ethics, experimental ethnography, and related subjects. Over the past decade, her empirical research has focused on post-socialism and the politics of memory, and more recently on deindustrialization and waste and discard studies. She is a member of the research groups Postcity and Postscapes, funded respectively by the Croatian Science Foundation and NextGenerationEU. She has served as editor-in-chief of Etnološka tribina / Ethnological Forum, the journal of the Croatian Ethnological Society, and was a long-standing member of the editorial board of Studia ethnologica Croatica. She was also a co-founder and editorial board member of hed-biblioteka, a book series of the Croatian Ethnological Society. Currently, she is a member of the international editorial board of Ethnologia Europaea, the journal of the International Society of Ethnology and Folklore.

She is the author of the book titled Fieldwork for Apprentice Ethnographers (Zagreb, Croatian Ethnological Society and FF Press, 2014) and co-author, with Nevena Škrbić Alempijević and Tihana Rubić, of Thinking Ethnographically: Qualitative Methods in Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology (Zagreb, Croatian Ethnological Society and FF Press, 2016). Her last book, co-authored with Tea Škokić and titled Where Did the Factory Go? Rethinking Post-Industrial Communities, Cities, and Societies (Zagreb, Institute for Ethnology and Folklore Research, 2022), examines social landscapes of ruination and deindustrialization in a small Croatian industrial town.

Complete bibliography: https://www.croris.hr/crosbi/searchByContext/2/290