Dr Špela Drnovšek Zorko is an Honorary Research Fellow (2021-2024) in the Department of Sociology and an incoming JSPS Fellow (2022-2023) at Waseda University, Tokyo, where her project will investigate current intersections between borders, racialization, and new formulations of East-West relations. Her interdisciplinary research explores the politics of race, migration, and memory through the lens of diasporic postsocialism and global encounters with ‘postness’, with a specific emphasis on Central and Eastern Europe, contemporary Britain, and the Yugoslav region. She obtained her Marie Curie-funded PhD in Anthropology at SOAS, University of London (2012-2017) and was previously a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Warwick Department of Sociology (2017-2020). Špela is affiliated with the Dialoguing Posts and NODE UK-Japan networks and is a convenor of the British Sociological Association Diaspora, Migration and Transnationalism study group. In the past she worked as a translator, with a particular predilection for translating Slovenian poets into English.

Latest publications:

Drnovšek Zorko, Š. 2021. “Relational debris: Notes toward a research methodology of postness.” Special issue on “Postcolonial-postsocialist decolonial investigations: a programmatic overture”, eds. Kumar, M. and Narkowicz, K. Artha Journal of Social Sciences 20: 2, 1-14.

Drnovšek Zorko, Š. and Debnár, M. 2021. “Comparing the racialization of Central-East European migrants in Japan and the UK.” Special Issue on “Migrations and diversifications in the UK and Japan”, eds. Phillimore, J., Liu Farrer, G. and Sigona, N. Comparative Migration Studies 9: 30, 1-17. 

Drnovšek Zorko, Š. 2020. “Cultures of risk: On generative uncertainty and intergenerational memory in post-Yugoslav migrant narratives.” The Sociological Review 68: 6, 1322-1337.

Drnovšek Zorko, Š. 2019. “Articulations of race and genealogies of encounter among former Yugoslav migrants in Britain.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 42: 9, 1574-1591.

s.drnovsek-zorko@warwick.ac.uk