Biography

From a young age, I was keenly aware that the neat categories that bound and define our sense of belonging--ideas like "home," "nation," and "family"--were much more complex and difficult for some than for others. My experience growing up as a refugee from Bosnia and Herzegovina in Tucson, Arizona, gave me the opportunity to understand how political geography is produced in the everyday, through acts of inclusion and exclusion small and large. When I began my studies at the University of Arizona, I learned that such quotidian experiences were of enormous value to scholars trying to understand how political geographic realities that we take for granted are enacted and reproduced. As an MPhil student in geography at Cambridge, my work has focused on using participatory video to bring out how actually-existing political contestations over urban space and belonging play out among youth in Sarajevo. In my PhD, I hope to continue this engagement in Bosnia and expand it to Istanbul, Turkey, where a set of shared histories and contemporary struggles beckons for research that can think about how young people navigate nationalist politics and everyday material struggles across contexts. My experiences as a Gates scholar have been some of the most enriching in my life, and I am honoured to return to this community.

Previous Education

University of Cambridge Geographical Research 2019
University of Arizona Geography and Africana Studies 2018