Research Focus Areas

Short Biography

Beja Protner is a sociocultural anthropologist with a PhD degree from the University of Cambridge, interested in migration, borders, space and time, memory, emotions, political violence, and grassroots politics, with a regional focus on Southeastern Europe and the Middle East. She is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Vienna, where she works together with Dr. Monika Palmberger (PI) and Adnan Smajić on the project “Enacting (digital) citizenship from below: A study on care and the uses of digital infrastructure by refugees in Bosnia and Herzegovina,” funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF). The project explores the role of digital technologies in the relationships of care, belonging, and struggle, built and sustained by global migrants/refugees on the intersection of online and offline spaces.

Beja’s academic path started at the Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology of the University of Ljubljana, where she studied the effects of statelessness in the case of systematic “Erasure” from the population registry in post-Yugoslav Slovenia. She later moved to Istanbul, Turkey, where her research focused on Turkey’s Kurdish question, histories and memories of war and political violence, (political) emotions, affect, gender, belonging, and visual/digital violence. Her undergraduate thesis, defended at the University of Ljubljana (2014), was on interethnic relations among diverse university students in Istanbul and conflicting memories of the war in Turkey’s Kurdish region. In 2017, she completed her MA study at Sabancı University in Istanbul with a thesis on “Perpetrator Graffiti,” in which she investigates the emotional effects of violent images and graffiti from the urban war zones in Turkey’s Kurdistan on Kurdish and left-wing young people in Istanbul, who followed the war through digital technologies. Since 2019, Beja has been an associate editor of the Kurdish Studies Journal.

Before joining her research team at the University of Vienna, Beja has conducted long-term ethnographic research with Kurdish and left-wing political refugees from Turkey in Greece, in which she engaged with the questions of space and time in the intersecting contexts of political exile and the European border and asylum regimes. After focusing on waiting, hope, and survival in her MPhil research (2019), her PhD thesis (2024) discusses multiple spatiotemporalities that exiles symultaneously inhabit in protracted transit. During her research in Greece, Beja worked with the Border Violence Monitoring Network (BVMN) and was involved in grassroots struggles against border violence and for migrant rights in Athens together with her Kurdish/Turkish collaborators and other local activists. She is interested in bridging the academic and non-academic knowledge production through engaged, participatory, collaborative, and decolonial methods and alternative forms of ethnographic writing.

Selected Publications

Peer-reviewed Articles

• "What Can Revolutionary Refugees Teach Us About Survival and Responsibility in the Time of COVID-19" (in Slovene), Journal for the Critique of Science, Imagination, and New Anthropology XLX, no. 285 (2023): 187-206.
• "The Limits of an 'Open Mind:' State Violence, Turkification, and Complicity in the Turkish-Kurdish Conflict,” Turkish Studies 19, no. 5 (2018): 671-696.
• "Reading and Feeling Gender in Perpetrator Graffiti and Photography in Turkey," Kurdish Studies 6, no. 1 (2018): 59-83.
• "‘Baby-killers' and Other Monsters: Demonization of the Enemy in the Nationalist Narratives of the Turkish-Kurdish War in Turkey" (in Slovene), Bulletin of the Slovene Ethnological Society 55, no. 1-2 (2015): 9-21.
• "Europe’s Erased: Rethinking European Migration and Citizenship Policies Based on the Example of the Erased Residents of Slovenia,” Student Anthropologist 3, no. 2 (2013): 127-141.
• "'Tracksuits' and 'Orange Faces' – 'You See Him and You Know:' Discourse about the Appearance of Čefur" (in Slovene, with Blaž Bajič), Ethnologist 22, no. 73 (2012): 93-110.

Book Chapters

• "'You see them, surely you recognize them right away!:' Discourse on the Appearance of Čefur’ (with Blaž Bajič), in Horizons of Otherness, ed. Nika Škof (A priori, 2013), 131-146.
• "A Tourist with a Chessboard" (in Slovene, with Blaž Bajič and Mladen Gotal, in Zgodbe izbrisanih prebivalcev [Stories of the Erased Residents], eds. Uršula Lipovec Čebron and Jelka Zorn (Sanje, 2011), 125-143.

Other Publications

• “Foreword" (in Slovene), in Kurdsko žensko gibanje: Zgodovina, teorija, praksa [The Kurdish Women's Movement: History, Theory, Practice], Dilar Dirik (Inštitut Časopis za kritiko znanosti, 2024), 7-17.
• "Debordering Futures: Racial Capitalism, Coloniality and Migrant Justice” (with Danai Avgeri, Dita N. Love, and Awa Farah), the other side of hope 4, no. 1 (2024), 130-143.
• "Engaging with Coloniality Through Alternative and Decolonial Methodologies: Interview with Carolina Alonso Bejarano and Peter Quach" (with Carolina Alonso Bejarano and Peter Quach), CRASSH Conference Blog, https://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/blog/debordering-futures-conference-interview-with-carolina-alonso-bejarano-and-peter-quach/, 1 May, 2024.
• "The Kurdish Women’s Freedom Movement: Gender, Body Politics and Militant Femininities, by Isabel Käser,” Kurdish Studies Journal 1, no. 1 (2023), 317-327.
• "Regarding the Eviction of the Self-Organized Refugee Camp in Lavrio, Greece: How Turkey’s War on Kurds and the European Union’s War on Migrants Intersect,” CrimethInc., https://crimethinc.com/2023/07/24/regarding-the-eviction-of-the-self-organized-refugee-camp-in-lavrio-greece-how-turkeys-war-on-kurds-and-the-european-unions-war-on-migrants-intersect, 24 July, 2023.
• "No Friend but the Mountains: The True Story of an Illegally Imprisoned Refugee, by Behrouz Boochani, transl. Omid Tofighian.” Blog of The Centre for the Study of Global Human Movement, https://www.humanmovement.cam.ac.uk/blog/book-review-behrouz-boochani-2018-no-friend-mountains-true-story-illegally-imprisoned-refugee#_edn1, 9 April, 2021.
• "Problems of the European Migration Policies and the Grey Zones They Produce” (in Slovene), Rozpotja [Crossroads] 4, no. 11 (2013), 18-21.

Selected Presentations

Invited Talks and Lectures

• "Political Potentialities and Ambivalences of the Threshold: Turkish/Kurdish Exiles in the European Borderlands.” Introduction to Political Anthropology: Power, Governance and Resistance, Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Vienna, forthcoming, 13 May 2025. 
• “(Im)mobility, Time, and Space on the European Margins” (in Slovene). Ethnology of Europe, Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, University of Ljubljana, December 2024.
• “Revolutionary Time in Spaces of Survival: Comradeship and Sommunal Life among Political Refugees from Turkey and North Kurdistan in Greece" (in Slovene). International Conference “Science for Society – Revolutionary Political Thought of Kurdistan.” Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana, April 2024.
• “Hope and Survival in Transition: Experiences of Kurdish and Left-Wing Political Exiles from Turkey in Greece.” The Centre for the Study of Global Human Movement, University of Cambridge, October 2020.

Selected Conference Presentations

• “Folded Space-time: Refugee Confinement and Carceral Resistance among Kurdish and Left-wing Exiles from Turkey/North Kurdistan in Greece.” Pembroke Workshop on Migration, Identity, and Memory. Pembroke College, University of Cambridge, March 2024.
• “Inscriptions of Kurdish Politics into Spaces of Exile and Radical Internationalist Politics in Greece.” Kurdish Studies Conference. London School of Economics, April 2023.
• “Displacement/emplacement and Political Movement: The Production of Internationalist Spaces of Radical Politics with the Kurdish and Left-wing Political Refugees from Turkey in Greece.” The Migration Conference 2022. Mohammad V University, Rabat and online, September 2022.
• “Experiences of Refugeehood and Political Subjectivity: The Case of Kurdish and Left-Wing Political Refugees from Turkey in Greece.” The Migration Conference 2020. Southeast European University, Tetovo (online), September 2020.
• “Spatiotemporal Nodes of Refugeehood and Inscriptions of Revolutionary Hope: Experiences of Kurdish and Left-Wing Political Refugees from Turkey in Athens, Greece. Royal Anthropological Institute conference 2020: Anthropology and Geography: Dialogues Past, Present and Future. RAI, RGS, the British Academy, the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at SOAS, and the BM’s Department for Africa, Oceania and the Americas (online), September 2020.
• “Hope and Survival on the Margins of Europe: Kurdish and Left-Wing Experiences of Precariousness from Turkey to Exile in Greece.” EASA Biennial Conference: New Anthropological Horizons in and Beyond Europe. ISCTE – Lisbon University Institute and ICS – Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon (online), July 2020.
• “Violent Graffiti and Photography from the War Zones of Northern Kurdistan: Conceptual Reconsiderations and Epistemological Affordances of Anthropology” (in Slovene). Symposium Politics and Poetics of Street Art, Ljubljana Street Art Festival, Alternative Ljubljana, June 2020.
• “Affective Digital Encounters with the Gendered War in Turkey.” Gender Studies 2019 Conference: On Violence. University of Helsinki, October 2019.
• “The Limits of an ‘Open Mind:’ State Violence, Turkification, and Complicity in the Turkish-Kurdish Conflict.” Turkey at Critical Crossroads: Dynamic Trajectories for Society, Politics and Culture. Instituto Superior de Ciências Sociais e Políticas, Lisbon, January 2017.
• “Victims, Perpetrators, and Implicated Subjects of the Turkish-Kurdish Conflict.” Encountering Perpetrators of Mass Killings, Political Violence and Genocide. University of Winchester, September 2015.
• “Doing and Experiencing Ethnographic Fieldwork in/on the Environment of Political Conflict: Conflicting Narratives, Ethical Issues, and Positionality.” 13th International “Border Crossings” Students’ Conference: Balkan Worlds, Balkan Lives: Experiencing, Sensing and Imagining the “Realities.” University of Sarajevo, April 2015.
• “’We live together but we don't live together:’ Experience of Borders by Students in Istanbul.” 11th Border Crossings Network Student Conference: Border Crossings and Experiencing Transitions: On Border Anthropology and Anthropological Nomadism. National School of Political Studies and Administration, Bucharest, April 2013.
• “The Erased of Europe: The Problem of the Erasure from the Population Registry of Republic of Slovenia in the Scope of European Migration Policies.” 10th International “Border Crossings” Student Conference: (Re) Searching Europe: Narrating the Past, making the Present and imagining the Future. Yeditepe University, Istanbul, April 2012.

Media Interviews

• “The Kurdish Community in Greece: A Transient and Politicised Diaspora” (original in Catalan), by Miguel Fernández Ibáñez. Nationalia, 28 November 2024, https://www.nationalia.info/new/11645/the-kurdish-community-in-greece-a-transient-and-politicised-diaspora?llengua_ant=en. 
• “The Definition of the ‘Refugee Crisis’ has to change” (in Turkish). Newaya Jin 199 (October 2021): 15.
• “If This is a Crisis for Anyone, It is for the Refugees” (in Slovene), by Mirt Bezlaj. Delo, 9 November 2020, https://www.delo.si/novice/svet/zalostno-je-da-prevladuje-mnenje-da-je-z-migracijami-kaj-narobe.