BB: Who Is a Worker? Online English Teachers and Constitutive Non-Recognition

Who Is a Worker? Online English Teachers and Constitutive Non-Recognition in Post-Socialist Serbia. Tens of thousands of people in Serbia teach English online to students in East Asia, yet their status remains unsettled. The platform treats them as contractors, the state as freelancers, and those around them as people who do not really work. Drawing on fieldwork from 2026 and the 2020–21 freelancer protests, the talk proposes the concept of constitutive non-recognition to name this condition.

Jelena Košinaga is a Senior Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and European Ethnology, University of Graz, where she leads the FWF-funded project Everyday Lives of the Western Balkan Online English Teachers. She holds a PhD in Literary and Cultural Studies from the University of Szeged. Her research spans cultural anthropology and feminist theory, focusing on language, digital and emotional labor, and transnational everyday life.