Charles University Team

Dr Karel Čada is a researcher at of Department of Sociology at the ISS. He completed his doctoral studies at the same department (2008 to 2015), which included years 2013-2014 which he spent as an Erasmus Mundus doctoral scholar at the Centre for European Studies at the Australian National University. He is currently the principal investigator of the project “Dynamics of Poverty and Social Exclusion in the Czech Republic” funded by the Czech National Funding Agency. With Dr Jakub Grygar, he received the ERSTE Foundation Fellowship for the project on Vietnamese cuisine and socio-material proximities in the making of cosmopolitan city (2015-2016). Between 2014 and 2015, he was a leader of the research mapping Czech socially excluded localities (The Ministry for Labour and Social Affair). He has published in the area of social exclusion, poverty, education inequalities, non-governmental organisations and social and health policies.

Dr Veronika Frantová holds a PhD in Sociology from the Institute of Sociological Studies at the Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University (Prague). At this institute she has been teaching qualitative research methods and courses focused on the culture wars in the post-communist context and rationality and emotionality in the public sphere, with particular attention to the theoretical reflections on anti-Islamic discourse. Her research interest lies in the  theories of public sphere, civil society studies, cultural sociology and qualitative methodology.  In her dissertation thesis she theoretically and empirically elaborates on the concept of a binary symbolic code of civil society by Jeffrey C. Alexander and Philip Smith. Through this narrowly-focused analysis she intends to contribute to a wider debate on the role of emotionality and rationality in the public space.