Name and Surname
Dragana Mrvoš
Affiliation
n/a
Contact email
dragana.mrvos@gmail.com
Short Biography
While growing up in Serbia and witnessing sweeping historical changes at the end of the 20th century, including the fall of Communism and, in the case of former Yugoslavia, the formation of new nation-states through a series of brutal wars, I initially became interested in political theory and questions with respect to oppression. I came to understand that national oppression was one of the reasons for the country’s collapse, but not the only one. The economic disparity between more and less industrialized regions, and expansionist tendencies from different countries, came to full display by the 1990s. Then, in the field of political science during my graduate studies, I explored the transformations of socialism and its convergences with capitalism within broader global processes. Significant reforms were launched in both capitalist (neoliberalism) and socialist (perestroika) economies, and modern technology and communications made all of us uneasy neighbors, showing their lethal potential as well as liberating capabilities.
My dissertation followed in that vein of re-examining the power of technology. When the economic crisis of 2008 set the stage for the expansion of gig jobs, a widely contested debate sparked over the benefits and shortcomings that the new type of work brings and over the social implications that it has. My dissertation analyzed structural characteristics of the digital platform economy and the global political landscape increasingly riddled by crises. I aimed to help set the intellectual agenda for thinking about collective labor and grassroots organizing as economic and political emergencies unfold. Completed research also forged a new interpretation of flexibility and freedom on digital platforms and examined the relationship between material dispossession, social alienation, and labor organizing.
Recently, I extended my research into urban systems and a series of massive and parallel changes conditioned by the geographic dispersal of economic activities, integration of labor markets, and migration. As a part of the Fulbright Global Scholar Program 2024/2025, I undertook a 4-month-long empirical research project in collaboration with CAS SEE at the University of Rijeka (Croatia). This project aimed to understand how the City of Rijeka is restructured and reimagined from an industrial to a knowledge city, and the range of experiences of the labor migrants in the city’s transformation. Although the same imperative to work shapes migration from one state to another and from countryside to an urban center within a state, post-industrial transformation intensifies material disparity among different migrant groups, resulting in new types of social fabric, exclusion, and policy proposals.
As part of the 2025/2026 RECAS cohort, my primary interests will be in international migration, comparative evaluations and reflections on how things work ‘here’ and ‘there’ among migrants and whether migration contributes to democratic change in politics and economy or prevents it from occurring.
Research abstract
In an ongoing ‘age of migration’, various studies measure the benefits and losses of migration in terms of monetary gains, while social capital (social remittances) remains a rather neglected aspect. Ideas about political remittances (as a particular subcategory of social remittances) as inherently ‘democratising’ also remain trapped in the notion that migrants ‘send back good norms’ from largely Global North to largely Global South contexts, rather than acknowledging ongoing circulation. To fill the gap in understanding the remittance patterns among migrants from their origin and destination contexts, this study will test the assumption of the democratising nature of political remittances from migrants living in consolidated, liberal democracies. In operationalizing the key term of democratic structures, this study will explore a pro-democratic push in the economy in addition to democracy in politics. Put differently, if the goal is to influence policy to democratise unequal power relations, a pro-democratic push shall be concerned with the struggle for democracy in politics and the economy. How does the migratory movement of youth, which is often provisional, impact the relations with authorities, identities, and politicised topics such as abortion laws, gender relations, political strategies of campaigning, and so on? What’s behind migrants’ assessments of the economy in the origin and destination context? What are their top economic concerns? What are the expectations and future imaginaries among youth migrants about the economy? By encompassing political and economic aspects as deeply intertwined, findings based on surveys and interviews with young migrants, individuals between the ages of 18 and 35 who voluntarily or involuntarily leave their country of origin (i.e., Serbia and Croatia) to study and work in Germany, Austria, and the United States, will shed more light to whether and how migration contributes to democratic change or prevents it from occurring.