About
Sanja is a Lecturer E&R (Assistant Professor) in Communications and Digital Media and the Director of PhD programme in Media and Communications in the Department of Communications, Drama and Film at the University of Exeter. Sanja's research focuses on social and digital media in contexts of identity, migration, nationalism, polarisation, and post-conflict justice and reconciliation. She is the author of monograph 'Doing Nation' in a Digital Age: Banal Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism in Polymedia Environments (Routledge, 2025) that develops a new theory and concept of national identity. It argues that the nation comes into being and is sustained through everyday mediated interpersonal communication and represents embodied cultural and discursive practices, and not an abstract imagined community. The book is based on 3-year-long ethnographic research and in-depth interviews with Serbian Londoners, on how they navigate digital media environments to negotiate their identities, with a focus on their banal expressions of nationalism and cosmopolitanism. She received Honorary mention Best Paper Scholar award for her article based on this research, titled 'Globalised difference': identity politics on social media, by the European Communication Research and Education Association (ECREA).
Her other stream of research explores inter-ethnic and intra-ethnic interactions regarding legacies of wars. Prior to joining Exeter, she worked a postdoctoral researcher (Research Officer) on a prestigious ERC-funded project Justice Interactions and Peacebuilding in the European Institute at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She used different methodologies to consider the role of social media and various actors in promoting a discourse sift from denial to the acknowledgement of war crimes, and more generally under what conditions people move from denial to acknowledgement. These methods include focus groups, discourse analysis, survey experiments, and quantitative text analysis. Some of this work has been published in International Journal of Communication and Journal of Interventions and Statebuilding.
Sanja's current research focuses on polarisation and deliberation in (post-)conflict contexts and Western Europe.
She received a PhD in Media and Communications from Goldsmiths, University of London, having previously graduated in Media and Communications at the LSE. She was recognised as a Global Talent by the British Academy and is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.
Sanja has provided expert advice to various governmental and commercial stakeholders, including the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), and has given numerous interviews to the media.
She is a Lead Supervisor to two PhD students studying migration, identity and digital media.