portrait photo Matej Butko

Mgr. Matej Butko, PhD

Senior Research Fellow
Aktion Österreich-Slowakei
AÖSK-Stipendien für Postdoktoranden

Contact

Universitätsstraße 7 (NIG), 1010 Vienna
Room: C0422

E-Mail: matej.butko@fses.uniba.sk 

Guest of the research team CaSt: https://carestate.univie.ac.at/guests/guests-2025/

Research Focus Areas

  • Anthropology of the State
  • Local politics
  • Informal economies
  • Borders and borderlands
  • Memory studies
  • Transcarpathian Ukraine

Short Biography

Matej Butko is a social anthropologist currently working at Faculty of Social and Economic Sciences (Comenius University in Bratislava) as post-doc/research fellow. His research interests are in strategies in spheres of people’s economies, power and politics, which he studies in wider context of social, economic and political transformations of the East-Central European region, and particularly of the outer Schengen border. He conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Transcarpathian Ukraine and studied the communities living by the Schengen border with Slovakia. As doctoral student, he benefited from the initiative Visegrád Anthropologists’ Network, coordinated by Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle (Saale), and participated on research projects focusing on management and operation of Slovak-Ukrainian border.

Publication project (monograph)

Dr Butko’s research focuses on social/cultural construction of state through local/cross-border agency of communities, living by the Ukrainian-Slovak border. In his planned monograph he will inquire into the role of collective memory of past transformations in legitimation of the informal model of local politics and negotiation of the power relations. In his monograph, Dr Butko will utilise anthropological approaches to the research of a state, borders, politics, popular economies and the memory studies, while building upon the empirical material, obtained through long-term fieldwork in Transcarpathian Ukraine.

Selected publications