I am an anthropologist who researches the financial practices of rural entrepreneurs in post-socialist Europe. My research focuses on how debt shapes local markets and how business owners use their social and professional resources to make ends meet despite pervasive arrears and struggles to adapt to the European market. These issues are analyzed in my book, The Art of Getting By in Istrian Winemaking, which I am in the midst of revising.
Building on this, my Marie Curie-funded research project, Tax Evasion for Market Control: Predatory Economies in Practice, investigates how tax practices translate into market power. Mentoring the project is Dr Karen Boll. My work therefore intersects with the literatures of anthropology, political economy, and post-socialist transformation. The project seeks to shed light on the contemporary tax environment for rural family businesses and the tensions and contradictions they must navigate in daily life. I am especially interested in contrasting their experiences against those of large national firms in their sector, and how the latter influence tax policies governing them.
•2022 (forthcoming). ‘Without friends, you don’t exist’: The value of favours in Istrian winemaking. In: Peter Howland (ed.). Wine and the gift: From production to consumption. Routledge (Critical Beverage Studies Series).
•2018. Solastalgia in Istria, Croatia: Winemaker narratives of landscape and loss. In: Hanna Horáková, Andrea Boscoboinik, and Robin Smith (eds.), Utopia and neoliberalism: Ethnographies of rural spaces. Lit Verlag (Freiburg Studies in Social Anthropology Series), 149-170. ISBN: 9783643803156
