I am a postdoctoral researcher in cultural anthropology and European ethnology with a background in English studies and feminist theory. I completed my PhD in Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Szeged, where my research focused on desire, language ideologies, and Japanese women’s engagement with English. Before entering academia, I worked for several years as an online English teacher, an experience that strongly shaped my research interests. My work brings together ethnography, discourse analysis, and feminist theory to explore language learning, emotional labor, online work, and migration in transnational contexts, with a particular focus on everyday life and lived experience.
My current postdoctoral research examines how online English teachers in Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina navigate professional, emotional, and everyday life in digitally mediated work environments. Focusing on teaching platforms and everyday practices, the project explores how intimacy, care, and affect shape online language education and how teachers manage the blurred boundaries between work, home, and personal life.
1. What fascinates you most about your field of expertise?
What fascinates me most is how language learning is deeply entangled with emotions, aspirations, and everyday life. Rather than seeing English simply as a tool for communication, my work explores how desire, imagination, and social relationships shape people’s engagement with language. I am particularly interested in how learners form emotional attachments to English and to English teachers (including AI teachers as well) and what this reveals about broader social values, mobility, and identity in a globalized world.
2. Which aspect of your work is particularly enriching for you?
The most enriching aspect of my work would be the close connection between research and lived experience. Having worked for many years as an online English teacher, I have witnessed firsthand how language learning unfolds in intimate, everyday settings. This experience continues to inform my ethnographic approach and allows me to remain attentive to learners’ voices, motivations, and emotional investments.
3. What significance does ethnographic research have in today’s world?
In today’s digitally mediated and transnational world, ethnographic research plays a crucial role in making visible how large-scale transformations, such as digitalization and the growing presence of AI, are experienced in everyday life. By immersing themselves in everyday practices, ethnographers reveal how powerful technologies and global forces (such as AI platforms or the worldwide spread of English) are actually experienced locally—often in ways that statistics or big data alone cannot capture.
A clear example is language learning. Once confined to classrooms, it now unfolds across apps, social media, migration trajectories, and personal relationships. At the same time, AI tools are reshaping not only how languages are taught but also the working conditions of teachers, frequently increasing precarity and invisibility. An ethnographic and anthropological lens helps us understand these shifts: it shows how global languages are felt emotionally and culturally in specific communities, while simultaneously underscoring the enduring human need for contact, care, and relationality that no algorithm can replace.