Doctoral Dissertation Defense of Jelisaveta Fotić

On Tuesday, July 7th 2026, Jelisaveta Fotić, Associate for Publishing Activities at the Institute for Balkan Studies SASA, defended her doctoral dissertation at the Department of Ethnology and Anthropology of the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Belgrade. The title of the dissertation was “The Life of People with Diabetes between the State and Civil Associations: A Comparative Study in Serbia and Croatia.”

This is a topic that, in the regional context, had not previously been systematically and comparatively examined within the fields of ethnology and anthropology. The comparison between Serbia and Croatia made it possible to draw analytically productive insights from their shared Yugoslav and socialist legacy, as well as from their different post-socialist institutional and political trajectories, into various forms of relations between the state, the healthcare system, and civil society. The dissertation also has broader significance for the development of scholarly thought, as it demonstrates that questions of public health, the state, civil association, and the everyday experience of chronicity must be considered within a shared analytical framework.

The dissertation was supervised by prof. Bojan Žikić, PhD and asst. prof. Zorica Ivanović, PhD, from the Department of Ethnology and Anthropology of the Faculty of Philosophy.