Dr Sanja Vico is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Communications and Digital Media at the University of Exeter, and a Collaborator on the ÐÓ°ÉÂÛ̳ ERC-funded project Justice Interactions and Peacebuilding: From Static to Dynamic Discourses across National, Ethnic, Gender and Age Groups, where she previously worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher. Sanja is also a Research Associate of ÐÓ°ÉÂÛ̳E - ÐÓ°ÉÂÛ̳ Research Unit on South Eastern Europe. She obtained a PhD in Media and Communications from Goldsmiths, University of London in 2019, an MSc from the London School of Economics and Political Science in 2013, and a BSc from the Faculty of Political Sciences of the University of Belgrade in 2012.
She has published on social media in contexts of migration, identity, nationalism, and post-conflict justice and reconciliation. Her awarded past research project explored how Serbian Londoners navigated social media environments to negotiate their identities, with a focus on their banal expressions of nationalism and cosmopolitanism. In her current project, she studies intra-ethnic interactions comparatively - on social media and in physical environments - regarding the legacy of war to consider the role of social media in promoting discourse shifts in this context.
She received Honorary mention Best Paper Senior Scholar award for her article 'Globalised difference': identity politics on social media by the European Communication Research and Education Association (ECREA) in 2019. She has a forthcoming book on nationalism on digital media with Routledge. She has given interviews about her research and has commented on current affairs in the Western Balkans for several media outlets, including Al Jazeera Balkans, and provided expert advice to various governmental and commercial stakeholders, including the House of Lords and the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO). Her collaboration with the BBC led to the launch of BBC News service in Belgrade in 2018.