Hi, my name is Jelena and I am a sociologist. Well, sort of.
Sociologist was not something I ever aspired to become. Back in 2001, I went to university with the ambition of becoming an English teacher. I was the first person in my family to ever go to university, although at that time “first-gen” was not something anyone I knew would identify as. Soon, however, I decided teaching was not something I was born to do and, despite all my love for the language, English became a secondary interest of mine. I did graduate, with fairly good grades even, yet by the time I laid my hands on the diploma, I was deeply involved in a range of extracurricular activities that were, according to my mother, a colossal waste of time. Plus, they didn’t pay.
Student activism, I learned years later, was how many who became professionally interested in higher education got initially hooked on it. I am no exception. Not long after I graduated, and very much thanks to my experience with university affairs, I landed my first job. That was a hell of a job, I thought at the time, not least for the regular trips abroad it sent me on, and, back in 2007, regular trips abroad were nothing short of a luxury for the vast majority of Serbian passport holders. I guess I got hooked on that too. Because the 25-year-old me wasn’t a time waster after all, I decided to try my luck with some of the scholarship programs that would allow me to study abroad. And so I ended up spending the next 2 years living in 5 European countries and studying—higher education.
It was during my master’s studies, and perhaps especially in the years immediately following my graduation, that I realized I enjoyed doing research. I was offered a job at a small research center, which allowed me to dedicate myself almost entirely to researching, writing, and talking about higher education. So I worked on learning the ropes and becoming good at it. As a trained philologist and literature nerd, I was poorly equipped to do social science research. But I made up my mind and my master’s had already been a giant stepping stone in that direction. Before I knew it, I ended up in a doctoral program, with a research project on higher education. Make no mistake: I did not pursue a doctorate because I wanted to become an academic. In all fairness, I was clueless at that point about what I wanted to become.
If I could describe my doctoral journey in one sentence, that would be a journey of gradually and irreversibly becoming seduced by sociology. By this, I do not mean that I fell in love with it. It’s more like sociology crept into my thinking behind my back. It corrupted me, if you will. I also took a keen interest in organizations and became fascinated by the study of institutions. All this was a blessing and a curse. Blessing, because it did help me “see” things I deeply cared about as a researcher in a different light (a cliché but so be it), which did feel quite liberating. Curse, because it pushed me towards what some academics would call “epistemic boundaries,” which is a fancy way of saying I was at the same time in many places and no place at all.
A friend of mine once remarked that the worst sin an academic could commit is being an outsider. This became obvious to me soon after I started my postdoc, which happened to be in a group that was in name and spirit as sociological as they get. This was a challenge, which I liked. But, it turns out, prolonged exposure to sociology made me, depending on who you asked, either “too much of a sociologist” or “not a real sociologist”—actual quotes, both. Being simultaneously too much and too little of something is a condition I have come to recognize as perfectly normal for anyone working across disciplinary boundaries. It is also, I have found, not a bad place from which to ask interesting questions.
I am no stranger to being an outsider. Nothing about my background says “future academic” and yet here we are. If I could point my finger at one thing that led to this moment, that’s a dense web of coincidences, lucky circumstances, and many wonderful people who were there when it mattered. But I embrace the sociologist, the historian of knowledge, the organizational scholar, the institutionalist, and the internationally oriented qualitative researcher in me—and I have stopped wondering whether the list is supposed to stop somewhere.
Today I work as a sociologist at the intersection of sociological theory, historical sociology, and knowledge infrastructure studies. I am currently PI of a DFG-funded project at the Robert K. Merton Center for Science Studies, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, examining how successive knowledge infrastructures constitute organizations as comparable and governable objects, treating digitalization as sedimentation rather than rupture. I approach the academic calling with a commitment to international exchange, to working across disciplinary and theoretical boundaries without losing sociological grounding, and to the intellectual formation of students and early-career scholars as a core part of what the discipline owes its future.