A concern with power and politics links all of my research and writing.

My ethnograhic research in North Macedonia has explored multiple power formations. My first research examined how US and EU diplomats' public commentary on Macedonian political reform amounted to a kind of international intervention (Graan 2010, 2015, 2016a). I then investigated how the state-sponsored nation branding and urban renovation project titled, "Skopje 2014," provided government pretext to police public discourse and public space (Graan 2013, 2016b). I have also analyzed how practices of publicity contributed to political polarization following the 2018 Prespa Agreement (Graan 2021). These empirical studies in Macedonia grounded my larger theorization of the politics of public spheres (Graan 2022a, 2022b).

In addition, I have written and edited a collection on language and political economy (2016c, 2016d). This work sought to bridge foundational work on language and political economy from the 1980s and 1990s with newer scholarship on the state, neoliberalism, and publics.

More recently, Carl Rommel and I (2024) have written about the "normative power," of the project form, that is, the ways in which the dynamics and expectations of project making exert a normative push on social organization and collaboration.

Here are my writings on politics and power:

2024 Projects and Project Temporalities: Ethnographic Reflections on the Normative Power of the Project Form. Social Anthropology/Anthropologie sociale 32 (3): 1-19. Co-Authored with Carl Rommel.

2022a Publics and the Public Sphere. In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Anthropology. Ed. Mark Aldenderfer. New York: Oxford University Press.

2022b Marketing Logics and the Politics of Public Spheres: On Discursive Engineering and Enclosure. The Journal of Linguistic Anthropology. 32 (2): 301-325.

2021 Seeing Double: Political Polarization and the Identity Politics in (North) Macedonia, before and after the Prespa Agreement . Pp. 173-205. In The End of the Macedonian Question? Identity Politics after the Prespa Agreement, edited by Vasiliki Neofotistos. New York and London: Routledge

2016a Strategic Publicity: On International Intervention and the Performativity of Public Communication in Post-Conflict Macedonia. HAU: The Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (3): 277-303.

2016b The Nation Brand Regime: Nation Branding and the Semiotic Regimentation of Public Communication in Contemporary Macedonia. Signs and Society 4 (S1): S70-S105.

2016c Introduction: Language and Political Economy, Revisited. HAU: The Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (3): 139-149.

2016d Editor, “Language and Political Economy, Revisited.” A Special Section in HAU: The Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (3): 139-335. [Comprised of seven original research articles, an introduction and an afterword.]

2015 Chronotopes of the Political: News Media, Public Discourse, Mass Action in Postconflict Macedonia. In Culture, Catastrophe and Rhetoric: The Texture of Political Action, edited by Robert Harriman and Ralph Cintron. Pp. 47-67. New York: Berghahn.

2013 Counterfeiting the Nation?: Skopje 2014 and the Politics of Nation Branding in Macedonia. Cultural Anthropology 28(1): 161-179. With online supplement at: https://culanth.org/fieldsights/counterfeiting-the-nation-skopje-2014-and-the-politics-of-nation-branding-in-macedonia

2010 On the Politics of Imidž: European Integration and the Trials of Recognition in Post-Conflict Macedonia. Slavic Review69(4): 835-858. [Named a finalist for the 2012 Council on European Studies First Article Prize.]