Name and Surname
Vanja Grujić
Affiliation
Federal University of Pernambuco, Brazil
Contact email
Short Biography
Vanja Grujić is a Visiting Professor at the Postgraduate Interdisciplinary Program in Human Rights at the Federal University of Pernambuco, Brazil. She holds a PhD in Philosophy of Law from the University of Brasília and MA in Political Science from the Faculty of Political Sciences, University of Belgrade.
Her work is situated at the intersection of legal and political philosophy, with a particular focus on peripheral and semi-peripheral social formations and transformations of governance. She teaches and supervises in the areas of critical theory, human rights, gender, and public security, and is the coordinator of the research project Periphery, Body and Politics (UFPE).
She is the author of Balkan Pathologies of Modernity: The National Question between Consensus and Conflict (Nomos, 2018) and Critiques of Law: Sites of Transformation (forthcoming, 2026), and has edited volumes and published articles in international journals.
Research abstract
My research explores the possibilities of renewing Critical Theory from the perspective of the periphery. The project examines how concepts such as universalism, domination, critique, institutions, and social transformation are articulated and take different forms in peripheral contexts, particularly in Southeastern Europe and Latin America. The research engages with postcolonial and decolonial theory, especially Latin American decolonial thought and feminist theory, in order to question the center–periphery hierarchy in the production of social and philosophical knowledge and to rethink the emancipatory potential of critical theory today.
I also investigate these questions through the analysis of concrete institutions, particularly those related to public security in Latin America, where the intertwinement of the periphery as a space and the bodies that both occupy it and are produced by it opens a different perspective on critique and social transformation. It was initially developed through the international conference Critical Theory from the (Semi)Periphery and continues through an edited volume that brings together scholars from Serbia and Brazil working on critical theory from peripheral and semi-peripheral contexts.