Dr. Sara BENCEKOVIC

Sara Benceković joined the University of Luxembourg in 2023 as a Postdoctoral Researcher on the European Financial Centres in Transition (FINCITY) project. Prior to joining the university, she was a PhD Researcher at Trinity College Dublin, Department of Geography, working on the Western banks in Eastern Europe: New geographies of financialisation (GEOFIN) project. Her dissertation focused on the penetration of Western European finance in East-Central Europe following the fall of socialist regimes. She earned her MSc in Sociocultural Anthropology from the University of Oxford (UK) in 2016 and her BA in Dbl. Hns. Anthropology and Psychology (summa cum laude) from York University (CA) in 2014.

Sara’s work is situated at the crossroads of economic geography, regional transformations, and ethnographic studies of finance. Using qualitative methodological approaches and thick description, her research spans a wide range of topics, from restructuring financial centres in the permacrisis era and the financialised postsocialist transformation of Yugoslav countries to the bordering business during the Balkan refugee wave. Her research stays extended her work to the urban scale, where she looked at gardening as resistance in Istanbul and forms of civil involvement with urban issues in Bangalore. These various interests are united by a common thread of how financialisation and crisis shape social, economic and spatial transformations.