Panel-discussion of the CSF-SRA project ISOLATION was held at the Annual Conference of the Croatian Ethnological Society

At the Annual Conference of the Croatian Ethnological Society, organized by the Department of Ethnology and Anthropology of the University of Zadar and held from 21 till 23 May 2025, the research team of the bilateral Croatian-Slovenian project Isolated People and Communities in Slovenia and Croatia – ISOLATION held a panel-discussion titled “The burden of field work – experiences and skills of ethnographic insights“.

The panel included four presentations and a discussion:

• Research into “life in containers” through participative ethnography (Lana Peternel - ISRZ, Dan Podjed - Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Lucija Mihaljević - Croatian Catholic University)
• Burden of field work: Etnographic challenges of researching home in the context of seamen (Nikolina Hazdovac Bajić, University of Dubrovnik)
• Affective infrastructure and challenges of ethnographic field work in abandoned areas (Ana Perinić Lewis, Institute for Migration Research)
• Alone between voids: Field work experience in forgotten places (Lana Peternel, IDIZ)

The panel thematized field work that erases boundaries between researchers and respondents, while revealing the emotional, ethical and epistemological burden of entering the lives affected by crisis, trauma and institutional invisibility.

The ISOLATION project is financed by the Croatian Science Foundation and the Slovenian Research Agency. Project Principal Investigators are Lana Peternel (Institute for Social Research in Zagreb) and  Dan Podjed (Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts).