Research Assistant
barbara.turk-niskac@zrc-sazu.si
Barbara holds a PhD in Ethnology, Cultural and Social Anthropology from the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia (2016). Before joining the Institute of Anthropological and Spatial Studies, she was Marie Skłodowska-Curie research fellow at the Faculty of Education and Culture, Tampere University, Finland. She began her academic path in 2008 as junior research fellow at the Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology in Ljubljana. 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). From 2019-2022 she was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute of Slovenian Ethnology, ZRC SAZU. She taught at Sigmund Freud University and at the Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology in Ljubljana. Apart from academia, she worked for International Organization for Migration (IOM – UN Agency) and as a guardian for unaccompanied migrant children. As of 2025, she is a member of the editorial board of the journal Visual Anthropology.
Her main research interest lies at the intersection of the anthropology of childhood and anthropology of work, and also includes children´s peer cultures, childhood memories, the anthropology of education, environmental anthropology, multispecies ethnography, visual, multimodal and participatory methods.
While her earlier research focused on children's participation in activities situated along a play–work continuum within the context of children's social interactions and intersubjective meaning-making, her MSCA project broadened this perspective to include more-than-human relationality. Through a study of childhood memories related to children's participation in subsistence practices in rural Slovenia, she explored work as a life-sustaining activity that integrates economic rationality and more-than-human relationality. This approach highlighted the relational, affective, and material entanglements between human work, social relations, and the environment including animals, plants and landscape.
Selected projects
A Patch of Land: Re-considering Work as a Life-Sustaining Practice in the Post-Socialist Semi-Periphery Through Intergenerational Childhood Memories, Recovery and Resilience Plan, NextGenerationEU (research project, June 10, 2025 – June 30, 2026).
A Patch of Land: Re-considering Work as a Life-Sustaining Practice in the Post-Socialist Semi-Periphery Through Intergenerational Childhood Memories, HORIZON-MSCA-2021-PF-01, grant agreement 101061450 (research project, September 5, 2022 – March 4, 2025).
Project websites:
https://projects.tuni.fi/patchwork/
https://blogs.tuni.fi/patchwork/
The Social Life of Chores: Rethinking Work in Childhood (postdoctoral research project, August 10, 2019 - July 31, 2021)
Project website: https://antropologijaotrostva.zrc-sazu.si/o-projektu/
Museum exhbition
Stories of steljniki: The Interweaving of Common Bracken, Animals, and Humans, Slovene Ethnographic Museum, 21.2.2025 – 28.9.2025
TURK NISKAČ, Barbara. 2025. The Value of Common Bracken Revisited: A Walking Ethnography of steljniki. Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society 49 (2), 90–105. DOI: https://doi.org/10.30676/jfas.141505
TURK NISKAČ, Barbara in Pauliina Rautio. 20245 [IN PRESS]. ‘If you were always with them, you were their friend’: Cows and oxen co-constituting childhoods in grazing memories of rural Slovenia. Southeastern Europe.
TURK NISKAČ, Barbara in Zsuzsa Millei. 2024. “Children, Common Bracken and Cows at Work: Re-Considering Work in Multispecies Relations through Childhood Memories.” Children’s Geographies, 2024, 1–14. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/14733285.2024.2425325
TURK NISKAČ, Barbara. 2024. ZINE Common Bracken and its Multispecies Assemblages. V: Adelina, C., Andriessen, L., Ashepet, M., Brinkman, I., Carlile, E., Carvalho, G., De Musso, F., Devos, E., Dierckx, S., Dowse, N., Edae-Tufa, M., Guglielmo, A., Kavedžija, I., Rainho, R., Soberon, L., Stroeken, K., Thompson, A., Turk Niskač, B., Van Bockhaven, V., & Wachira, J. More-than-human Freedom Zine Conference 2024. More-than-human Freedom Zine Conference 2024, DOI: https://doi.org/10.17613/qt3c-rn81
TURK NISKAČ, Barbara. 2023. “‘Who Would Like to Go to the Movies With Me?’ Negotiating Social Participation Through Word Play.” NEOS 15 (2): 1-4. https://acyig.americananthro.org/neos/archived-issues/
FURU, Christin, Angel Chan, Jonna Larsson, Ingrid Engdahl, Sarah Klaus, Anna May Navarette in Barbara Turk Niskač. 2023. “Promoting Resilience in Early Childhood Education and Care to Prepare Children for a World of Change: A Critical Analysis of National and International Policy Documents.” Children 10, 716. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3390/children10040716
TURK NISKAČ, Barbara. 2023. The ambiguous nature of children's work in socialist Yugoslavia: an analysis based on children's magazine Pionirski list. The journal of the history of childhood and youth 16 (3): 456-476. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/hcy.2023.a909990
TURK NISKAČ, Barbara in ŠRIMPF VENDRAMIN, Katarina. 2022. Play and folklore in children's peer cultures. Folklore 86: 33-58. DOI: https://doi.org/10.7592/FEJF2022.86.turk_srimpf
TURK NISKAČ, Barbara. 2022. Raziskave z otroki in mladostniki: etični in metodološki izzivi. Glasnik Slovenskega etnološkega društva 62 (1): 83-94.
TURK NISKAČ, Barbara. 2021. O igri in delu: Antropologija zgodnjega otroštva. Ljubljana: ZRC SAZU. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3986/9789610505181
A Patch of Land: Re-considering Work as a Life-Sustaining Practice in the Post-Socialist Semi-Periphery Through Intergenerational Childhood Memories (June 10, 2025 - June 30, 2026)