Owen Kohl

Owen Kohl’s research explores connections between media-making and different social imaginations of home. Among other questions, he asks how belonging and communication technologies intersect with violently constructed national homelands—both in the contemporary US and after socialist Yugoslavia’s dismemberment. Before completing a Ph.D. in anthropology at UChicago, Kohl began preliminary research on manifestations of hip hop in France, Senegal, Croatia, Russia, and Mongolia, which he later continued throughout ex-YU. He has since taught at different colleges and universities, designing courses interwoven with ethnographic methods, multimedia production, and his manuscript, Were the Balkans Made for Rap? A Domestic Hip Hop Primer. Kohl’s consideration of the politics of media now extends to analyzing relationships between news production, alterity, and crisis narratives.