Zaira Tiziana Lofranco (PhD)
Winter Term 2019/2020
Zaira Tiziana Lofranco is an adjunct professor of anthropology at the University of Milan. She is spending this winter semester at the University of Graz as a research fellow in the field of excellence “Dimensions of Europeanization.” Currently her research focuses on the financialization of everyday life linked to Europeanization in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Key features of this process include a credit sector dominated by European banks and a currency (KM) with a fixed exchange rate to Euro. Lofranco’s aim is to provide an ethnographically informed study of life in a financial periphery as experienced “at the bank counter.” Therefore she plans to carry out an anthropological analysis of household experiences with credits provided by European banks in Sarajevo, where she has conducted research since 2005. She plans to further analyse the impact of post-war financial dynamics on pre-existing practices and the social life of households caught in downward socio-economic mobility. This is presented in the context of post-socialist and post-war impoverishment and the transformation of Bosnia and Herzegovina into a “small open economy.”
"The project Dimensions of Europeanization gives me the chance to address my research topic in an interdisciplinary framework, which has been essential to reflect on the Europeanization process and its multiple dynamics."
Lofranco finished her PhD in Anthropology and Analysis of Cultural Transformations at the Oriental University of Naples. Her main research interests lie in ethnic relations and practices and (urban) anthropology in the context of political, geographical, and socio-economic transformations in Bosnia and Herzegovina. She participated in the EU-project “Eastbordnet: remaking Eastern borders in Europe,” where she focused on money and borders. She was also involved in the EU ANTICORRP project, where she carried out an ethnography of corruption practices in Bosnia and Herzegovina.