Jana Kujundzic

Jana joined Northumbria University in September 2022. Previously, she held lecturing and research assistant positions at Kingston University and the University of Hull. She was awarded a PhD in Criminology in 2022 from the Department of Sociology at the University of Essex. Her PhD titled 'Marital Rape in Croatia: Law, Economic Precarity and the Politics of Professional Judgment' was an empirical and theoretical study of marital rape in Croatia with special focus on the politics of professional judgment. She has two MAs, one in Gender Studies (Central European University) and another in Sociology (University of Zagreb). Her BA was in Philosophy and Sociology (University of Zagreb). Jana is a long-term member of various grassroots feminist, anti-fascist and LGBTIQ movements in the Yugoslav region and beyond.

Jana’s research interests sit at the intersection of Marxist political economy, socio-legal studies, and abolition feminism. She is particularly interested in how capitalist social relations, state power, and post-socialist transformations shape the production, regulation, and lived experience of gender-based violence. Her work draws on Marxist, queer, and abolition feminist traditions to destabilise naturalised understandings of gender, sexuality, and the nation-state, and to interrogate the coercive institutions that mediate them.

Jana has presented her work at numerous local and international conferences. Her recent project, Towards an Abolition Feminist Framework in Former Yugoslavia, developed abolition feminist theory and praxis specific to post-socialist contexts. This project generated publications that interrogate capitalism, patriarchy, and state responses to domestic and sexual violence, while critically mapping feminist engagements with carceral expansion. It also traced the consequences of privatisation and post-war transition, particularly the erosion of socialist infrastructures of solidarity and community care, to illuminate the material conditions that shape contemporary struggles against gendered violence in the region.