Former Fellows

ILV FELLOWSHIP 2006/2007, 2007/2008


Central European University

Theodora Vetta (Greece). According to democratization discourse and policies in Serbia, major emphasis is given on the role of civil society. Theodora’s project will focus on the new social realities created by the direct intervention of NGOs in the everyday life through their dynamic relations with the State institutions and the donor community.
Supervisor: Don Kalb
PhD at Department of Ethnology and Social Anthropology, École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris.

Justus Aungo (Kenya). NGOs and other multinational aid/development agencies working in poor and 'underdeveloped' regions and communities conceive transformation and change through projects and interventions. Such interventions and projects create and are in turn sustained by discourses of contrasts between the core and periphery societies. Focusing on Bosnia and Kenya, the study explores the nature and construct of the flows and portraits used in NGO-led development interventions and the underlying global-local hegemonies.
Supervisors: Don Kalb, Prem Rajaram, Jacqueline Knörr

Larissa Vetters (Germany). The Organisation of Solidarity in the Bosnian-Hercegovinian Town of Mostar. Approaches from Public Administration Sciences and Cultural Anthropology. Larissa aims to contribute to the theoretical and pratical understanding of the effects of internationally guided/monitored public administration reforms on local structures of solidarity (or exclusion) in Bosnia and Hercegovina.
PhD at German University of Administrative Sciences (Deutsche Hochschule für Verwaltungswissenschaften) Speyer, Germany

Eleonora Magda Craciun (Romania). Informal economy, clothing and consumption: a study of fake designer labels; this is a study of a transnational clothing network linking production and consumption sites in Turkey, Romania and beyond.
Supervisor: Ayse Caglar and Daniel Miller
PhD at UCL, London


University College London

Ana Bleahu (Romania). Ana’s thesis will be focused on the study of Romanian emigrants’ integration on "official" and on “informal” labor markets in Italy and Spain and will examine the informal forms of self-organization that arise among the migrants in order to organise and manage the challenges migrants face under a system that needs their labour but refuses to acknowledge this need publicly or institutionalise it openly.
Supervisor: Dumitru Sandu
PhD at University of Bucharest, Faculty of Sociology

Lydie Fialova (Czech Republic). Autonomy and agency of psychiatric patients in the context of post-socialist society: the psychiatrist's perspective.
Supervisor: Roland Littlewood
PhD at Charles University in Prague / Edinburgh University

Aleksandra Lojek-Magdziarz (Poland). Jihad: Legal and regligious aspects. This study includes historical research (Quran, ahadith and tafsirat through to thinkers like ibn Taymiyya) as well as an analysis of jihad in XIX and XX century. Ola is investigating the rise of fundamentalism understood not only as a rejection of the secular order of post-Enlightment Europe but also as an attempt to recover imaginary past glory of Muslims.
Supervisor: Cornelia Sorabji
PhD at Jagiellonian University, Krakow

Raluca Pernes (Romania). Development projects in the 'Second World.' Raluca is analyzing the redefinition of the role of the state in the context of interventions by international agencies.
Supervisor: Michael Stewart, Marius Lazar and Don Kalb
PhD at BBU, Cluj

Tamas Dombos (Hungary). Ethical Consumption: Discourse and Practice. Tamas is investigating how different actors - activists, entrepreneurs and consumers - co-construct the market as a politicized space. Three cases form the core of his empirical study: the daily operation of an organic food store, the introduction of fair-trade products to the market, and collective branding of locally produced goods.
Supervisor: Daniel Miller and Ayse Caglar
PhD at CEU Department of Sociology and Anthropology


Max Planck Institute of Social Anthropology

Vihra Barova (Bulgaria). The focus of this research is strongly connected to the intense periods of urbanisation, following the Second World War and the collapse of socialism in 1989, which did not appear to cause a break up of relations between urban and rural residents of the same kin. Vihra's research work looks at family networks that operate between countryside and city and the kinds of social and economic strategies that are employed. She carried out her fieldwork in the Central Rhodope mountain region of Bulgaria, which is famous for its strong kinship ties. She uses ethnographic and network analysis methods in order to investigate the kinship practice in times of transition and insecurity.
Supervisors: Chris Hann
PhD at the Ethnographic Institute and Museum, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences

Sorin Gog (Romania). My research project is focused on the way the new post-socialist cosmology is restructuring religion and how it is shaping the religious mentalities of contemporary Romania. I analyze the symbolic architecture of the discourse that surrounds and penetrates the dead body and of the way the cemetery is transformed into a micro-world that reflects the religious, ethnic and cultural struggles of the new post-socialist world.
Supervisor: Chris Hann
PhD at BBU, Department of Sociology

Yulia Guzhvenko (Russian Federation). My research interests are focused on ethno-social dynamics of population’s structure in post-Soviet [Eastern] Kazakhstan with special emphasis on migration movements. I will analyze different (domestic, external, etc) migration flows, its political and economic context, Kazakh government language policies and its implementation on regional level, ethnic attitudes between two main ethnic groups – Russians and Kazakhs.
Supervisors: Gunther Schlee, Svetlana Jacquesson
PhD at Anthropology, National Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilizations

Tihana Rubic (Croatia). Kinship and family relations in rural and urban socialist and post socialist Croatia: patterns, praxes, rituals, values; Tihana is focusing in particular on cultural anthropological interpretation of role of kinship and family in urban and rural settings, in 20th century (notably, second half) in Croatia. The research and the analysis are dealing with everyday patterns, praxis and values attached to family life, social security, family assistance, rituals, rules and expectations.
Supervisors: Patrick Heady
PhD at Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb.

Diana Szanto (Hungary). I intend to take international development as a field to study the functioning of the double process of fixing and transforming collective identities. By observing interpersonal interactions involving actors and beneficiaries of international aid organisations working in West Africa I would like to discover the varying strategies of the social use of collective identities, as well as to reflect on their cultural dimension. I believe that such a study might ultimately contribute to challenge the dichotomy of modernity and tradition still underlying the "Big Divide" between the "developed" and the "developing" world.
Supervisors: Jacqueline Knörr

Damiana Otoiu (Romania). (Re)constitution of private property in Central and Eastern Europe after 1989 withn particular reference to the restitution of Jewish community property in Romania.
Supervisor: Kebeet and Franz von Benda-Beckmann
PhD at Free University of Brussels, Faculty of Social, Political and Economical Sciences & University of Bucharest, Faculty of Political Sciences

Monica Vasile (Romania). Communal forest property in Romania; Monica is working in the Vrancea Mountains of Romania, investigating the post socialist property regime of using resources and not actually actually owning land.
Supervisor: Kebeet and Franz von Benda-Beckmann
PhD at University of Bucharest, Faculty of Sociology and Social Work

Maja Veselic (Slovenia). The impact of the PRC's modernization reforms in Education; she is focussing in particular on effects of these reforms on the ethno-religious identitifications of Hui youth in Northwestern China.
Supervisor: Keebet Benda-Beckmann
PhD at Dept. of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana


Goldsmiths University of London

Gábor Halmai (Hungary). Anti-neoliberalism in Hungary and Brazil. My research investigates the way people mobilize in reaction to globalization through the examples of the "civic circles" and the MST. Within the context of neoliberal hegemony, the potential of autonomous bottom-up organization is probed in two post-authoritarian semi-peripheries.
Supervisors: Don Kalb and Stephen Nugent
PhD at CEU, Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology

Joanna Zalewska (Poland). Old age in youth culture. Case of Warsaw.
Supervisor: Frances Pine
PhD at GSSR, Polish Academy of Sciences


Babes-Bolyai University

Yelis Erolova (Bulgaria). The markers of self-identification of Roma/Gypsies are main constructing elements of their identity. My project research Roma/Gypsy identity expressions in the spheres of their material culture (house, dress, food and etc.).
Supervisor: Marius Lazar
PhD at Balkan Ethnology Department, Ethnographic Institute and Museum, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Bulgaria