Jana Bacevic

Jana Bacevic is a sociologist and an anthropologist. Her work is in the domain of social theory, sociology of knowledge, and politics of knowledge production. She is interested in the ‘social life of concepts’ (from theoretical to vernacular) – an approach that has affinity with social epistemology and history of ideas, but emphasises the lived experience of production, use, and contestation of concepts. She has published extensively on the social and political elements of the production of knowledge, especially in the context of transition/social change.

Jana’s current work explores the constitution of subject-object relations in knowledge production, and the dynamics of involvement/detachment and proximity/distance, especially in the context of the production of critique. She is completing a thesis on the critique of neoliberalism in UK higher education and research, and developing a project that engages with forms of epistemic positioning in the context of prediction, anticipation, and thinking about the future.

Jana is a research associate in Critical sociology of higher education at the Culture, politics and global justice research cluster, and member of the Cambridge Social Ontology Group. Prior to coming to Cambridge, Jana was research fellow at the University of Aarhus (working on FP7-funded project “Universities in the knowledge economy – UNIKE”) and lecturer at the Central European University in Budapest; she spent periods doing fieldwork as a visiting fellow at the University of Bristol and University of Auckland. She has a PhD in social anthropology from the University of Belgrade.