Beja Protner

Beja Protner is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Vienna. She works with Dr. Monika Palmberger (PI) and Adnan Smajić on the FWF-funded project "Enacting (digital) citizenship from below," studying care and digital infrastructure use by refugees in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Her research focuses on migration, borders, political exile, and digital technologies in Southeastern Europe and the Middle East context.

Dr. Protner earned her PhD from the University of Cambridge (2024), where her thesis examined multiple spatiotemporalities inhabited by political exiles in protracted transit. She completed her MA at Sabancı University in Istanbul (2017) with a thesis on "Perpetrator Graffiti," and her undergraduate studies at the University of Ljubljana, where she researched statelessness in post-Yugoslav Slovenia.

Protner's research explores the intersection of migration, borders, and digital technologies, with a focus on care, injury, solidarity, and political exile. Her work examines how global migrants build relationships of care and belonging across online/offline spaces, particularly among Kurdish and left-wing political refugees from Turkey in Greece. She investigates spatiotemporal experiences of exile, political violence subjectivity, memory, and emotions within Southeastern European and Middle Eastern contexts.

Her publications reveal a consistent focus on forced migration, border regimes, political violence, and digital citizenship. Protner examines how marginalized communities navigate statelessness, political exile, and border violence through both physical and digital spaces. Her work consistently bridges academic and activist knowledge production, focusing on grassroots politics and decolonial methodologies in migration studies.

Dr. Protner has conducted long-term ethnographic research with Kurdish and left-wing political refugees from Turkey in Greece, working with the Border Violence Monitoring Network (BVMN) and participating in grassroots struggles against border violence. Her current FWF-funded project explores digital citizenship from below, examining care relationships built by refugees using digital infrastructure in Bosnia and Herzegovina. She has been an associate editor of the Kurdish Studies Journal since 2019.

Protner collaborates with activist communities in her research, particularly with Kurdish and Turkish collaborators in Athens. Her work with the Border Violence Monitoring Network and grassroots migrant rights organizations demonstrates her commitment to engaged, participatory research that bridges academic and non-academic knowledge production through decolonial methods and alternative forms of ethnographic writing.