Pol Llopart i Olivella, ANSO PhD Candidate and Research Assistant at the AHCD hosted project "Quiet Aid", has been awarded an SNSF Postdoc Mobility Fellowship for his project "Fragmented Belonging: Depopulation and Emptiness in a Balkan Borderland". He will carry out his research at the University of Oxford from 2027 to 2028. 

The project will examine the social consequences of rural depopulation in Serbia's Sandžak region, a historically Bosniak Muslim-majority borderland shaped by successive waves of out-migration. While recent scholarship has linked rural decline to democratic decline, political disenfranchisement, and the rise of populism, the experiences of religious and ethnic minorities remain largely absent from these debates. Likewise, state-led initiatives to revitalise villages and address demographic decline often promote selective visions of demographic renewal, belonging, and care that overlook minority perspectives and moral commitments. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, archival research, and collaborative visual methods, the project will investigate how Bosniak Muslims—and their Serbian Orthodox neighbours—experience and respond to depopulation in landscapes increasingly marked by abandonment, environmental degradation, and competing claims over their future. As villages empty, agricultural land, forests, and common spaces are abandoned, degraded, or reimagined through extractive industries, tourism, and other development projects. 

Rather than treating depopulation simply as demographic decline, the research explores how minority communities understand and govern it as a moral condition, and how everyday practices of care, environmental stewardship, and humanitarian engagement create alternative ways of valuing and inhabiting places often portrayed as empty or disposable. By bringing together debates on depopulation, religious ethics, and moral economies, the project aims to offer a new perspective on the relationship between demographic change, inequality, and democracy in Europe's peripheral borderlands.

SNSF Postdoc Mobility Fellowships are aimed at finishing doctoral students and/or recent PhD graduates who wish to conduct research stays abroad. The fellowship enables them to extend their scientific network and independence as well as enhance their research profile, in view of a future scientific or academic career in Switzerland.