Ready Steady Learn
Dr Susanna Trnka | Political violence on people's everyday lives, psychological states, and perceptions of national identity
MP3, 7m26s, 6.8MB, first broadcast 3 August 2010
Dr Susanna Trnka is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Anthropology.
Susanna’s primary research interests are the politics of health and the impact of political violence on people's everyday lives, psychological states, and perceptions of national identity.
Much of her work over the last ten years has focused on political violence, the body, and embodied practices of citizenship amongst Indo-Fijians in Fiji, as detailed in her book on the 2000 Fiji coup, State of Suffering: Political Violence and Community Survival in Fiji (2008).
Susanna also has a long standing interest in post-socialist societies in Eastern and Central Europe. Currently Susanna is undertaking two research projects in the Czech Republic. The first project focuses on citizenship, political violence, history and memory in the Czech Republic. The second project examines the politics of children’s health, particularly asthma and related respiratory conditions, in the Czech Republic and Central Europe. Both of these projects build on her previous work on political change and the domestic and working lives of Czech women, as described in her book Young Women of Prague (1997, co-authored with sociologist Alena Heitlinger) and in her edited volume, Bodies of Bread and Butter (1993).
In addition to her research in Fiji and the Czech Republic, Susanna is co-editing a book, Senses and Citizenships, on the intersections between sensory experiences and national identity in a variety of political contexts.
