Maja Petrović-Šteger is a social anthropologist (PhD, University of Cambridge 2006) with long term research experience in the former Yugoslavia, Tasmania and Switzerland. Her work explored various contexts where bodies – whether living, dead, or in the form of medically usable remains – become the sites of political, legal, scientific and artistic attention. Equally interested in what anthropology can contribute to understanding of the mind and consciousness, she has published on psychological and military concerns with mental health, mental hygiene and neuro-security in Serbia. Her latest projects consider contemporary societal conundrums and climate of precariousness. She is examining the culture of social entrepreneurship and looking at the transformative power of imagination in engaged creative practices of envisioning the future.
In 2014 she began researching the material and narrative conditions through which rivers are understood and imagined in rural and urban Serbia. She is focusing on Danube and the Morava River valley.
Maja is a Research Fellow and Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the Institute of Anthropological and Spatial Studies, at the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts.