Team
Eniko Vincze (Project Director)
Professor in sociology at Babeș-Bolyai University (Faculty of European Studies) and activist for housing justice within the movement from the city of Cluj, Social housing NOW!, the national platform Bloc for Housing and the European Action Coalition for the Right to Housing and to City, within which she initiated a series of militant research. In the last five years, her researches and publications addressed issues such as socio-territorial marginalization and racialization of poverty, unequal development and spatial injustice, housing politics and crisis, real estate development and capital accumulation. She participated as a country coordinator on several comparative investigations about the multiple deprivations and dispossessions that impoverished Roma were subjected to by the economic transformations and structural racism from Romania.
Jon Horgen Friberg (Research Director)
Jon Horgen Friberg is research professor and acting research director at Institute for Labour and Social Research. He holds a Ph.D. in Sociology, and has published widely within the fields of international migration and immigrant integration, EU free movement, labour markets and living conditions among marginalized groups, as well as social mobility and cultural change among youth in diverse societies. He has extensive experience using both qualitative and quantitative research methods.
Violetta Zentai (Scientific Consultant)
Violetta Zentai, social anthropologist, is associate professor at the School of Public Policy and research fellow at the Democracy Institute of the Central European University. She is also faculty member of the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology at the CEU. Her research focuses on ethnic and gender inequalities, post-socialist socio-economic transformations, European social inclusion policies, and pro-equality civil society formations.
Angéla Kóczé (Scientific Consultant)
Angéla Kóczé is an Assistant Professor, Chair of Romani Studies, and Academic Director of the Roma Graduate Preparation Program at Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. In 2013–2017, she was a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program at Wake Forest University in Winston Salem, NC, USA. She has published several peer-reviewed articles and book chapters with various international presses, including Palgrave Macmillan, Ashgate, Routledge and CEU Press, as well as several thematic policy papers related to social inclusion, gender equality, social justice, and civil society. In 2013, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC, honoured Kóczé with the Ion Ratiu Democracy Award for her interdisciplinary research approach, which combines community engagement and policymaking with in-depth participatory research about the Roma. She is a co-editor of The Romani Women’s Movement: Struggles and Debates in Central and Eastern Europe (Routledge, 2019, with Violetta Zentai, Jelena Jovanović and Enikő Vincze) and The Roma and their Struggle for Identity in Contemporary Europe (Oxford: Berghahn, 2020, with Huub van Baar.
Cornel Ban (Senior Researcher)
Cornel Ban joined Copenhagen Business School in 2019 as Associate Professor in International Political Economy. Prior to this, he worked as a Reader at City University of London, assistant professor (tenure track) at Boston University, postdoctoral research fellow at Brown University and visiting associate professor at Copenhagen Business School
Neda Deneva-Faje (Senior Researcher)
Neda Deneva-Faje holds a PhD in sociology and social anthropology from the Central European University. Her dissertation was an ethnography of Bulgarian Muslim migrants in Spain and the reconfigurations of citizenship by everyday acts, claims and struggles within EU regimes of mobility, labour and welfare. Her research has covered the topics of transnational migration, labour transformations and new work regimes, social citizenship and relations with the state, care work, and minority-state relations in Eastern Europe. Most recently, her research focused on high-skilled mobility of health and IT professionals from Bulgaria and Romania. Neda has held postdoctoral research positions at Humboldt University, Berlin, Babes Bolyai University, Cluj, Center for Liberal Strategies, Sofia, Centre for Advanced Studies, Sofia, and New College Europe, Bucharest.
Gabriel Troc (Senior Researcher)
Gabriel Troc is associated professor at the Faculty of Sociology and Social Work, Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, teaching courses on Introduction to Anthropology, Theory of Social Anthropology, Roma in Central and Eastern Europe and Postmodernism and Critical Thinking. He earned a PhD in Philosophy (2004) and a master in Cultural Anthropology (1998), both at Babeș-Bolyai University. His research interests include rural Roma populations, transnational migration, urban development, social stratification and labor relations in post-socialism. He did fieldwork in various rural areas from Romania (Oaș County, Sălaj, Teleorman, Maramureș, Danube Delta) and Italy (Veneto). He published a book on postmodernism in cultural anthropology and co-edited one on foreign anthropologists working in Romania.
Mara Mărginean(Senior Researcher)
Mara Marginean is a historian of the 20th century, specializing in the social history of industrialization, urban history, and the study of architectural design. Her research interests revolve around the urbanization and evolution of cities in Romania and Central Europe. She also looks at labor relations, aspects related to the standard of living, including institutions, academic approaches and practices; the study of knowledge production and transfer in the Cold War, and the city’s role in the circulation and transformations of knowledge. She is currently a researcher at the George Baritiu Institute of History in Cluj Napoca.
Sorin Gog (Senior Researcher)
Sorin Gog is a Lecturer at the Sociology Department of the Faculty of Sociology and Social Work, Babeș-Bolyai University Cluj-Napoca, teaching courses on contemporary sociological theories, symbolic anthropology, sociology of religion and paradigms of secularization. He has been a research fellow at University of Fribourg (Switzerland), Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology (Germany), Institut für Wissenschaft der Menschen (Austria), New Europe College (Romania), CEU-IAS (Hungary) and Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies (Finland). His current research project focuses on the field of personal and spiritual development programs and the way they are related to the current economic and political transformations of labor markets in Central and Eastern Europe.
George Iulian Zamfir (Junior Researcher)
During the last ten years, George participated at research projects focused on the production of social marginalization and ethnic discrimination through a wide range of processes: access to housing, education, healthcare, labor, migration, and territorial development policies. Besides academic and militant research, during the recent years he focused on housing rights activism in Cluj as part of the group Căși Sociale ACUM / Social Housing NOW, at national level with the coalition Blocul pentru Locuire, and internationally with the European Action Coalition for the Right to Housing and to the City.
Oana Pop (Junior Researcher)
Phd student at the Faculty of Sociology and Social Work, Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj. My research focuses on how socialist factories created and managed infrastructure for socializing domestic work, a topic I started exploring during my Master’s Program at the CEU between 2012-2015. More generally, I am interested in the gendered dimensions of industrial labour and in labour policies that shaped women’s access to work during the last decades of state socialism.
Ionut Foldes (Junior Researcher)
Ionut Foldes is a research fellow at the Interdisciplinary Center for Data Science and teaching assistant at the Faculty of Sociology and Social Work, Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca. He received his doctorate in Sociology in 2020 at the same university. His research interests focuses on population studies, sociology of the family, migration and quantitative research techniques.
Cristina Bădiță (Junior Researcher)
Cristina Bădiță: PhD Candidate at Doctoral School in Sociology, Department of Sociology, Faculty of Sociology and Social Work, Babes-Bolyai University, Romania. The working thesis is ethnographic research regarding migration and relocation practices and policies outside the Schengen Area.
Raluca Perneș (Junior Researcher)
Raluca Perneș is a PhD student at the Doctoral School of Sociology, Babeș-Bolyai University. Her main interests are in the field of social inequality, state, citizenship, and property relations. Previous research projects focused on labor force and economic transformation, legal pluralism, and interethnic relations. She has previously taught at the Faculty of Sociology and Social Work at Babeș-Bolyai University and at the Anthropology Department of University College London.
Dana Solonean (Junior Researcher)
Dana Solonean is a PhD student at the Babeș-Bolyai University, Faculty of Sociology and Social Work. She received a bachelor’s degree in territorial planning and a master’s degree in sociological research from Babeș-Bolyai University. She previously worked as a project coordinator in the NGO sector in Poland. She is interested in education, governance, and migration.
Ragna Lillevik (Junior Researcher)
Ragna Lillevik is a researcher at Fafo Institute for Labour and Social Research and holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Oslo. Her research interests are policy development and implementation with a focus on migration, integration and diversity. Lillevik’s work often focuses on the tensions between conflicting policy aims, and between policy and practice. She has experience with qualitative fieldwork and multi-methods projects, and working with marginalized groups such as undocumented migrants, asylum seekers and refugees.
Silje Andresen (Junior Researcher)
Silje Andresen is a Ph.D. research fellow at the University of Oslo and Fafo Institute for Labour and Social Research. In the spring of 2021 she will submit her Ph.D. thesis about how teachers work with controversial issues in multicultural Norwegian schools. Andresen has worked on a number of research projects at Fafo, where her research interests have primarily been within the field of education and integration, implementation of public policy and qualitative methods
Alexandru Burlacu (Junior Researcher)
Alexandru M. Burlacu is a PhD candidate at the Doctoral School “Population Studies and History of National Minorities”, Babeș-Bolyai University of Cluj-Napoca. Research interests focus on historical anthropology, migration, the history of industrialization and political economy.
Manuel Mireanu (Junior Researcher)
Manuel Mireanu has a PhD in political science from Central European University, Budapest. Currently working as an editor for the newspaper Cărămida. Main research interests are critical security studies, urban studies as well as the criminalisation of various marginalised groups. As side projects, he conducted research on Romanian history, foreign policy and international relations. Presently he is working on an independent research on the history of anticommunism in Romania between 1918 and 1919.
Timea Abram (MA Researcher)
Abram Timea, master student at Advanced Sociological Research, Faculty of Sociology and Social Work – Babeș-Bolyai University. Also, master student at Social Work in the field of justice. Probation and mediation, within the same faculty. I studied the phenomenon of music festivals in Romania for my bachelor’s degree in anthropology. My main interests related to sociological research are around the art field: music, theater, film; but also in other areas such as economy, labor, justice.
Denisa – Luciana Ursu (MA Researcher)
Denisa Ursu graduated from the Faculty of Sociology and Social Work. She is currently a student in the master’s degree in Advanced Sociological Research and the master’s degree in History of Ideas, History of Images. She is passionate about social themes as well as visuals arts (photography, painting, cinematography). Her bachelor research was also about analog photogrography.
Kiss Andrea Erika (MA Researcher)
Kiss Andrea Erika graduated from the Faculty of Sociology and Social Work. She is currently a student in the master’s degree in Advanced Sociological Research. The activities in which he was involved are those of volunteering and in three research studies, in partnership with Metro Media Transilvania.
Denisa Duma (MA Researcher)
Denisa Duma was born and raised in Cluj-Napoca and now she is a student at the Advanced Sociological Research Master program from the Faculty of Sociology and Social Work. She has a bachelor’s degree in Anthropology, based on field research about the romanian representations over the Hutsul ethnic group. Toward the end of high school, her interest in socio-human science has started to grow and she is now particularly interested in studies based on ethnic minorities, social inequalities and social stratification.
Ioana Ivan (MA Researcher)
Ioana Ivan is a clinical psychologist under supervision and is enrolled in the master program for clinical psychology and psychotherapy at the Babeș-Bolyai University. Her research interests are interdisciplinary, encompassing the socio-anthropology of labour, identity construction in marginal contexts and the role that cultural capital plays in defining drug use. At the moment, she is studying the impact of pharmacologically induced altered states of consciousness on the professional performance of psychotherapists.
Hestia Delibas (MA Researcher) 
Hestia-Ioana Delibas is a PhD Candidate in the program “Democracy in the Twenty-First Century” linked to the Centre for Social Studies (CES) at the University of Coimbra. Her research interests revolve around the topic of social and environmental justice, emancipatory rural politics and decolonialism with a focus on post-socialist spaces. She completed her master’s degree in Advanced Sociological Research and her Bachelor’s degree in Social Anthropology at the Faculty of Sociology and Social Work, from Babes-Bolyai University. Starting from 2021, she is a PhD fellow in the project JustFood: From Alternative Food Networks to Environmental Justice, funded by Foundation for Science and Technology. She is also a collaborator at Sociolink, the online Platform of Sociology and Social Anthropology.