Kailey Rocker, Ph.D.

Junior Visiting Fellow - Summer Semester 2022

Kailey Rocker is a junior visiting research fellow in the field of excellence, spending the 2022 summer semester in Graz. As a cultural anthropologist, her work is primarily based in Southeastern Europe – having lived, written about, and conducted research in Albania off-and-on since 2010.

During this fellowship, she will conduct a research project titled “Belonging in Europe – Albanian Participation in European Commemorative Frameworks.” Her project will draw on previously conducted ethnographic research in Albania as well as policy analysis to explore how EU debates and conceptualizations of memory over the past decade shape and are shaped by contemporary memory politics in Albania. She is interested in better understanding how regional and local memory processes to confront 20^th century regimes influence each other and, in turn, what it means to be Albanian and European today.

“To what extent are regional and local memory processes mediated by the need for a shared sense of the past and/or future?”

As a part of this effort, she will piece together timelines of EU resolutions and state/non-state memory projects in Albania in order to study the connections and disconnections between the two.

Kailey Rocker defended her Anthropology dissertation titled “Translational Justice: Facing the Past to take on the Present in Albania” at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill in 2021. Her dissertation examines the role that the state, civil society, and young adults play in shaping Albania’s efforts to deal with the past while creating a viable future for themselves and their country – 30 years following the collapse of state socialism in Albania.