Dr Ana Dragojlovic

Dr Ana Dragojlovic is an anthropologist working at the intersection of feminist, queer, postcolonial, and affect theory with a primary focus on gender and mobility, and violence, memory, and trauma. She has received her PhD in anthropology from the Australian National University.

Prior to joining the University of Melbourne, she lectured in Gender Studies and Anthropology at the Australian National University and held postdoctoral fellowships at the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS) in Leiden and at the University of Queensland.

She is the author of Beyond Bali: Subaltern Citizens and Post-Colonial Intimacy (Amsterdam University Press 2016, forward by Michael Herzfeld). This is an ethnography that constitutes the first extensive discussion about Balinese diasporic formations. Situated within the fields of post-colonial, critical race, and gender studies, the book explores under what social, political and historical circumstances Balinese subaltern citizens claim proximity and mutuality between themselves and to their former colonisers, rather than striving to reveal and commemorate colonial violence, as other subaltern citizens with Indonesian heritage in Dutch post-colonial society do.

She is a co-author of Bodies and Suffering: Emotions and Relations of Care (Routledge, August 2017, with Alex Broom) that offers a critical analysis of, and challenge to the ways in which suffering has been understood and experienced in everyday life. It does this through critical explorations of the lived experience of dying, adoption, migration, illness and care. Basing our argument on anthropological and sociological scholarship, we present suffering as relational, temporal, intergenerational, embodied, discursive, cultural, and normative, and seek to provide an analysis of the assemblages of suffering. The book draws on theories of affect, embodiment, the phenomenology of illness, and moralities of care, to produce a nuanced understanding of suffering as being located across the assumed borders of time, space, bodies, persons, and things