Our team

Bernadette Nadya Jaworsky is a professor of sociology at Masaryk University, Brno, Czechia and a Faculty Fellow at the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University. Recent books include A Critical Cultural Sociological Exploration of Attitudes toward Migration in Czechia: What Lies Beneath the Fear of the Thirteenth Migrant (with Radka Klvaňová, Ivana Rapoš Božič, Alica Rétiová, and Jan Kotýnek Krotký, Lexington Books, 2023). Her current research focuses on in-depth cultural sociological analysis and reconstruction of public issues such as perceptions of migration, and the “reverse sociology” of migrant responses to racialization and Othering. Her work has been published in the American Journal of Cultural Sociology, Migration Studies, Visual Studies, and the Journal of Nationalism, Memory & Language Politics, among others.

Mgr. Ivana Rapoš Božič, Ph.D., is a cultural sociologist interested in the topics of migration, civil society, and civically engaged art. She received her Ph.D. from the Department of Sociology at the Faculty of Social Studies of Masaryk University in Brno, where she presently works as a post- doctoral researcher and lecturer. She currently collaborates on two research projects whose aim is to explore the patterns of Othering in Czech society from the perspective of residents with a migratory background (“People Like Us? A Reverse Sociology of Migration in Czechia”) and political elites (“Images of ‘the Other’: Czech-German relations in times of crisis”) and a research project that focuses on automobility and aims to bring forward what is hidden, misunderstood, or suppressed in the conventional understanding of road accidents (“Comparative phenomenology of road accident causation”). Besides that, she also continues to pursue her interest in civically engaged art and explores patterns of cultural, civic, and political participation of people crossing borders. She has recently co-authored the book A critical cultural sociological exploration of attitudes toward migration in Czechia: What lies beneath the fear of the thirteenth migrant (Lexington Books 2023). Her other work has been published by Journal of Adolescent Research, Migration Studies, and Czech Sociological Review. (ORCID: 0000-0001-6605-1765).

Assistant Professor at Department of Law and Social Science at the Faculty of Business and Administration at Mendel University. She also teaches a course on migration at the Faculty of Social Studies at Masaryk University. Her student internship in a refugee camp initiated a long-term research interest in migration, immigrant reception, and integration. She is especially interested in the processes of othering and negotiation of the symbolic boundaries of belonging. In recent years she participated in projects “The Thirteenth Immigrant: in-depth exploration of the public perception of migration in Czechia (GACR 2019-2022) and “Smart Migration to the Czech Republic” (TACR 2019-2022). She is a co-author of the book A Critical Cultural Sociological Exploration of Migration Attitudes in Czechia: What Lies Beneath the Fear of the Thirteenth Immigrant (Rowman and Littleton 2023). In recent years she published in journals such as Population, Space and Place, Ethnicities, Population and Development Review and Migration Studies.

Alica Synek Rétiová is an assistant professor of sociology at Masaryk University, Brno, Czechia. Her main professional interest lies in cultural sociology and qualitative research. Her current research activities focus on the topics of migration and the civil sphere. In her PhD, she studied tensions in the civil sphere in Slovakia in the topic of LGBTQ rights. She has been involved in research projects on attitudes towards migrants in Czechia funded by Czech Science Foundation (“The thirteenth immigrant? An in-depth exploration of the public perception of migration in Czech Republic” and “People Like Us? A Reverse Sociology of Migration in Czechia”). Besides her research activities, she also continues to teach academic courses in areas of sociological theory and sociology of culture. She has published her work in journals like Visual Studies, European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology, and Czech Sociological Review.

Karel currently studies PhD in Sociology at the Department of Sociology, Faculty of Social Studies, Masaryk University. His interests include theoretical sociology, cultural sociology, economic sociology, environmental sociology and sociology and philosophy of technics. He also has some experience with studying and teaching social anthropology. Methodologically speaking, he mainly works qualitatively but have been venturing into various methods of computational text analysis.

Olga Zhmurko is a researcher and Ph.D. student at Masaryk University, Brno, Czech
Republic. She is a practitioner sociologist, who has organized, conducted and managed
social research in Ukraine since 2010. Olga leads the research agency Vox Populi; her
professional portfolio includes surveys on education, forced displacement, gender issues,
etc., for a number of Ukrainian and international governmental and non-governmental
organizations (Ministry of Education of Ukraine, Ministry of Culture of Ukraine, USAID,
Council of Europe, and others). She moved to Czech Republic in 2022 from Ukraine, and
now, the scope of her professional interests includes cultural sociology, sociology of identity
and forced migration. The topic of her dissertation is “Symbolic boundaries among refugees
and the transformation of identity within forced displacement.” In the People like us project,
she conducts data collection, coding and analysis. She is a specialist in qualitative research
and methodology design.