PhD students

SHORT PROFILES OF DOCTORAL STUDENTS:

Mgr. et Mgr. Katarína Azzamová

examines the intersection of spiritual and biomedical understandings of the body in contemporary meditative practices and research in the Czech Republic. Based on multi-sited ethnographic research, she analyzes how different conceptualizations of the body and healing are communicated and experienced in practice, and how they reflect broader sociocultural dynamics in the relationship between spirituality, science, and medicine.

Mgr. Eliška Beránková

Mgr. Eliška Beránková focuses on the sociology of family, care, and intergenerational relations. Her dissertation examines how childless older women create and maintain intergenerational ties within and beyond kinship.

Mgr. Veronika Sofia Corradi-Eiger

Mgr. Veronika Sofia Corradi-Eiger specializes in the sociology of inequality. Her dissertation examines intergenerational support as a stratification mechanism, with an emphasis on how life course position shapes access to parental support across Europe. She employs quantitative methods, particularly multilevel regression, sequence analysis, and decomposition techniques. She is part of the PRINS project at Masaryk University, Brno.

Mgr. Daniel Dvořák

In his dissertation, he studies the use of paradata in population research, particularly within the Generations and Gender Survey. He examines how the questionnaire completion process relates to response quality and measurement uncertainty, especially in variables capturing fertility intentions. He uses quantitative methods, paradata processing, and the analysis of respondents’ behavioural data traces.

Mgr. Karolína Gregorová

Mgr. Karolína Gregorová critically examines the rise of mental disability and distress among young people in the Czech Republic, focusing on how social norms, institutional structures, and inequalities shape lived experiences of mental health. Drawing on Critical Disability Studies, Mad Studies, and medical sociology, her work challenges individualised and biomedical explanations by analysing how mental distress is socially produced and understood.

Mgr. Thomas Philip Heyes

Mgr. Thomas Philip Heyes focuses on the validity and measurement of short-term and long-term fertility intentions, primarily within the Generations and Gender Survey. His dissertation examines how uncertainty and question framing shape measured fertility intentions across the life course. The research is conducted within a quantitative paradigm. Thomas Philip Heyes specialises in working in the open-source statistical programming language R.

Mgr. et Mgr. Darina Kmentová

In her dissertation, Darina Kmentová focuses on reproductive health, first reproductive experiences, and (in)fertility. Through quantitative data analysis, she investigates how different experiences in the reproductive life course influence quality of life and relationship dynamics within partnerships.

Mgr. Adéla Chvílová Kolářová

Adéla Chvílová Kolářová combines migration studies and social gerontology. She researches the social security strategies of migrants from Vietnam and Ukraine in the Czech Republic, who are now coming to an older age. She uses qualitative methods, especially in-depth interviews and policy analyses. She is a member of the IMISCOE PhD academy.

Mgr. Světlana Nedvědová

Mgr. Světlana Nedvědová specializes in sociology of death and bereavement. Her dissertation explores disenfranchised grief in Czechia, with an emphasis on queer related loss, suicide loss, and pregnancy loss. She employs qualitative methods, particularly Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis. On top of that, she is a junior researcher at the European Research University.

Mgr. Karel Němeček

Mgr. Karel Němeček works in sociology of finance, cultural sociology and social theory. His dissertation covers the rise of mass investing culture in post-socialist contexts, employing skills from qualitative methods to computational text analyses. He engaged broadly with international scholarly audiences (e.g. in Oxford or at Max-Planck-Gesellschaft).

Mgr. Madeline Paradise

Mgr. Madeline Paradise specializes in migration studies, with a focus on United States migrants in the Czech Republic. Her dissertation explores the complexities of U.S. migrant identities, negotiation of capital, and the ambivalence that informs their lived experiences across various migration landscapes. Her work challenges binary framings of structural privileges and hierarchies within global systems of mobility, offering more nuanced perspectives on the roles of linguistic, national(ity), and economic capital in a migration context.

Mgr. Daniela Rendl

Mgr. Daniela Rendl specialises in the sociology of medicine. Her dissertation examines barriers and privileges in two boundary-crossing professional fields: men in nursing and women in surgery. She investigates the organisation of healthcare, age and prestige-based inequalities, and the hierarchical dynamics of the Czech healthcare system. Her research is grounded in an interpretivist, gender sensitive qualitative approach, drawing particularly on grounded theory.

Mgr. Miroslava Smolková

Mgr. Miroslava Smolková specializes in the anthropology of technology, STS, posthumanism, and multispecies approaches. In her dissertation, she explores how autonomy is configured in human-machine relations in social robotics. She uses multi-sited ethnography and interpretive methods to examine the emergence of more-than-human sociality.

Ing. Zuzana Talašová

Ing. Zuzana Talašová specializes in the sociology of family and intergenerational relations. In her doctoral research, she analyzes transformations of family roles in four-generation families, with particular attention to late-life roles of great-grandparents, issues of care, gender expectations, and the moral dimensions of family life. She also examines the role of digital technologies and artificial intelligence in family caregiving practices. In her research, she employs a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods.

Mgr. Petra Tamášová

Mgr. Petra Tamášová examines the meaning of home and places for older women in housing insecurity. Through in-depth semi-structured interviews, ethnographic observation, and photographic methods, she seeks to interpret the experiences of those whose voices are not heard in the context of their intersectional identities —gender, age, and unsuitable housing situation.

Mgr. Jana Závodská

Mgr. Jana Závodská specializes in sociology of housing and the sociology of young adulthood. Her dissertation investigates the timing of transitions to residential independence among young adults in Czechia, examining who stays, who hosts, and why. Drawing on the Coleman Boat framework and the concept of chrononormativity, she combines quantitative analysis of Generations and Gender Survey data with in-depth qualitative interviews. Her research critically examines how structural housing barriers become individualized as personal failures in the context of the Czech housing crisis.