Matej Butko
Matej Butko is OeAD scholar and is affiliated with the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at Vienna University. He completed his PhD (2022) in social anthropology at Institute of Social Anthropology (Comenius University in Bratislava), where he works as research fellow/post-doc. In past he benefited from the initiative Visegrád Anthropologists’ Network, coordinated by Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle (Saale), and participated on research projects, focusing particularly on management and operation of the Slovak-Ukrainian, Schengen border.
As a part of the doctoral studies, dr Butko carried out ethnographic fieldwork in Transcarpathian Ukraine, among the Slovak-Ukrainian borderland communities. He explored the cultural/historical roots of these communities’ informal, cross-border economies, and analysed how participation in these economies relates to negotiation of state power at the border and in field of local politics. During his research stay in Vienna, dr Butko will work on planned monograph manuscript, based mostly on material gathered during his research in Transcarpathia.