barbara.turk-niskac@zrc-sazu.si
Barbara Turk Niskač was born in 1982 in Ljubljana. In 2007, she graduated at the Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology with the thesis titled Chaos and Cosmos among Albanian and Macedonian Youth in Gostivar, for which she conducted nine months of fieldwork in Macedonia. The thesis was awarded with Prešeren award for students of the University of Ljubljana. From 2008 to 2016, she worked at the Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology as a Junior Research Fellow and Teaching Assistant. She held practical classes popular culture, anthropology of tourism and visual anthropology. In 2017/2018, she also held practical classes and a seminar epistemology of everyday life. In 2016, she received PhD in Ethnology, Cultural and Social Anthropology. In her doctoral dissertation Playing at Work, Working at Play: An Ethnographic Study of Learning in Early Childhood, for which she conducted ethnographic fieldwork in two kindergartens, she examined the relationship between play, work and learning in early childhood. She was a Visiting PhD Student at the University of Sarajevo, Centre for Interdisciplinary Postgraduate Studies (2008), a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at the Rutgers University, USA (2016) and a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies – Southeast Europe (CAS SEE), University of Rijeka, Croatia (2018). In 2019, she was awarded with a Swiss Government Excellence Postdoctoral Scholarship and a postdoctoral research project of the Slovenian Research Agency at the Institute of Slovenian Ethnology (Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Art). Apart from academia, she worked for International Organization for Migration (IOM – UN Agency) as a project assistant on “Protecting Children in the Context of the Refugee and Migrant Crisis in Europe.” She has also worked as a guardian for unaccompanied migrant children, organized participative photo and film workshops for primary school children, and wrote several articles for general audience on the topics of anthropology of childhood and parenting.
She has been part of the institute between 2019 and 2022 with a postdoctoral project The Social Life of Chores: Rethinking Work in Childhood.
Regional interests: Slovenia, Southeast Europe
2021. Of children's play, work and idleness embedded in sociality. In Entanglements: experiments in multimodal ethnography 4 (1): 70-92. Read
2021. Distance learning and new forms of discipline during the pandemic. In Narodna umjetnost: hrvatski časopis za etnologiju i folkloristiku 58 (1): 85-106. DOI: 10.15176/vol58no105. Read
2020. Drobtinice prostega časa: prosti čas otrok med produkcijo in potrošništvom. In Etnolog: glasnik Slovenskega etnografskega muzeja 30 = 81: 15-28. Read
2020. From educational work to companionship: Juxtaposing adults’ and children’s perspectives on work and play in early childhood. Childhood: A global journal in child research 28 (1): 42-55. doi: 10.1177/0907568220947137. Read
2018. A Tale of Two Kindergartens: Visual Representations of Slovenian Children’s Daily Lives in a Rural and an Urban Setting. In Visual Encounters and Rural Childhoods. April Mandrona and Claudia Mitchell, ed. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. pp. 147 – 160.
2018. Otrokocentričnost in (ne) vključevanje otrok v delovna opravila v zgodnjem otroštvu (Protective parenting and the inclusion of children in chores in early childhood). In Generaciji navidezne svobode: otroci in starši v sodobni družbi (Generations of Freedom: Children and Parents in Contemporary Society). Tamara Narat and Urban Boljka, ed. Ljubljana: Založba Sophia. pp. 179 – 205.
2015. Otroci in otroštvo v etnologiji in antropologiji (Children and Childhood in Ethnological and Anthropological Studies). In Glasnik Slovenskega etnološkega društva 55 (1-2): 32-40.
2013. Childrenʼs Learning Through Observation in the Context of Work and Play. In Anthropological Notebooks 19 (1): 77-96.
2013. Naravna in kulturna dediščina skozi perspektive otrok (Children's Perspectives on Natural and Cultural Heritage). In Traditiones 42 (2): 127-147. Read
2013. Vprašanje socializacije v antropološki literaturi (The Question of Socialisation in Anthropological Theory). In Subkulture: Prispevki za kritiko in analizo družbenih gibanj XII. Tematska izdaja Socializacija in socialne formacije. Andrej Naterer, ed. 8-21. Maribor: Subkulturni azil Maribor.
2012. Predšolski otroci kot soudeleženci v raziskavi: pristop vizualne antropologije (Preschool Children as Co-Participants in Research: The Visual Anthropology Approach). In Časopis za kritiko znanosti. 39 (249): 33-44. Read
2012 (co-author Močnik, Teja) Čas iger in čas dela: Podobe otroštva kot jih je za preteklo stoletje izrisala slovenska etnologija (Time of Play and Time of Work: Images of Childhood drown down by the Slovenian Ethnology for the Last Century). In Zgodovina otroštva, Zbirka zgodovinskega časopisa 45. Aida Škoro Babić et al. ed. 163-173. Ljubljana: Zveza zgodovinskih društev Slovenije. Read
2011. Some thoughts on ethnographic fieldwork and photography. In Studia Ethnologica Croatica 23 (1): 125 – 148. Read