Marie Curie Fellowship
Welcome to my page on my Marie Curie Fellowship, funded by the European Union's Horizon 2020 program. My project, AnthroTax, started in early 2022 and is hosted by Copenhagen Business School. As part of it, I have been writing about various aspects of Croatian tax practices and changes, as well as the rise of predatory economic practices in post-socialist Europe, and writing journal articles and public communication pieces, some of which are listed below.
Public communication of research
Book launch: Anthropology & Tax, CUP
2025. Invited talk with co-editors at the London School of Economics & Political Science. Co-book launch with Deborah James to promote her work: Clawing Back: A New Anthropology of Redistribution in Precarious Times (Stanford UP).
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Taxing Tradition in Istria, Croatia
Terroir and EU Policies on Origin Products
2024. Invited lecture at Wageningen University & Research. Course: Origin Food: People, Place, and Products, convened by Dr. Mark Vicol.
Kindred Spirits in Istrian Distilling
2024. Invited lecture at Wageningen University & Research. Public Administration & Policy Group, Food for Thought lecture series.
Tax, Society, & People
2025 (in press). Contributor to a booklet for primary school education in the UK, citizenship education initiative funded by the Global Initiatives Grant of the Wenner-Gren Foundation.
Exploring Istrian Craft Distilling through the Ages
News from the Food Citizens? Team
Democracy in Agriculture & Food Provisioning: A Citizenship Lens
2025. Invited PhD seminar. Spring School, at Wageningen University & Research with co-lecturers Engin Isin, Joost Jongerden, and Cristina Grasseni.
Academic output from AnthroTax
2025. 'Fiscal politics'. In: Grasseni, Cristina (et al.) (eds.), Encyclopedia of Economic Anthropology. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, pp. 203-207. ISBN:9781035312573
Smith, Robin. 2024. 'The persistence of kindred spirits: Tax and values in Istrian distilling'. In: Mugler, Johanna, Miranda Sheild Johansson, & Robin Smith (eds.), Anthropology & tax: Ethnographies of fiscal relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 113-135. ISBN: 9781009254588
Mugler, Johanna, Miranda Sheild Johansson, & Robin Smith. 2024. 'Advancing an anthropology of tax'. In: Mugler, Johanna, Miranda Sheild Johansson, & Robin Smith (eds.), Anthropology & tax: Ethnographies of fiscal relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1-48. ISBN: 9781009254588
Living ethically in crony capitalism: The entrepreneurial values of Istrian winemakers. Conference paper presented at SASE, June 2024 as part of the Alternative Capitalisms Network.
Future plans
As publications are finished after the project, I plan for this page to become a repository of scholarly resources about the shortcomings of capitalism in the form of an annotated bibliography or organized/categorized lists of resources for other scholars to draw upon.
As it is a result of my research project, it will initially focus on southeastern European countries, but by no means is this meant to suggest that this region is the only place where capitalism is going wrong, obviously.