Professor Julia Szalai

Professor Szalai is currently ASRF Visiting Senior Research Fellow (March-June 2013). She is working with Professor Terry Cox on developing a framework for understanding the system-specific features of the post-communist welfare state.

Júlia Szalai graduated with an MA in “Applied Mathematics in Macro-economics” from the Budapest Univesity of Economics in 1971. She obtained her Ph.D. in Sociology in 1986 and her degree of Doctor of Science (DSc) in Sociology in 2007, both from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Since graduation, she has been working in the Institute of Sociology of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, where she is currently serving as Chief Scientific Consultant, and simultaneously acts as Head of the Welfare Research Unit.

Her main research areas include: comparative welfare state studies; social history of social policy in Central and Eastern Europe; class, gender and ethnic aspects of old and new poverty; recognition struggles and social movements of ethnic minorities in Central and Eastern Europe. She has been involved in a wide range of cross-country comparative investigations on the social costs of postcommunist transformation; gendered and ethnicised aspects of social exclusion in education and on the labour market; implications of recognition struggles of ethnic minorities on the changing contents of citizenship. She has joined the Central European University (CEU) in the early 1990s where she has taught courses on the social history of poverty in Central Europe, gender inequalities in labour force participation; sociological approaches to race and ethnicity with a focus on Roma in the post-communist region; and recently, studies on the welfare states in a comparative perspective. In 2007 she joined the Center for Policy Studies at CEU where she is Senior Research Fellow. Between 2008 and 2011, she served as the Pricipal Investigator of the EDUMIGROM research project (“Ethnic Differences in Education and Diverging Prospects for Urban Youth in an Enlarged Europe”), a collaborative project financed by the the 7^th Framework Programme of the European Commission that compared in an interdisciplinary way the situation of second-generation migrant and Roma youths in nine, “old” and “new”, member-states of the European Union. Together with Claire Schiff (France), Professor Szalai is currently working on an edited volume of a collection of essays that have grown out of the project. The book will be published by Palgrave/Macmillan in late 2013.

Ranging over the above-mentioned research areas, the list of Julia Szalai’s publications includes more than 320 articles in peer-reviewed Hungarian-, English-, French- and German-language journals, and 29 monographs and edited volumes, among others two large-scale cross-country comparative studies that have arisen on the grounds of the EDUMIGROM project: Contested Issues of Social Inclusion through Education in Multiethnic Communities across Europe and  Being ‘Visibly Different’: Experiences of Second-generation Migrant and Roma Youths at School.

During the period of her ASRF-fellowship, Professor Szalai plans to make advancement in developing a firm theoretical framework for understanding the system-specific features of the post-communist welfare state. In this endeavour she plans to closely collaborate with Professor Terry Cox in Central and East European Studies as well as with other colleagues from the School of Political and Social Studies and the College of Social Sciences who work in the broadly perceived field of comparative welfare state studies. The proposed concept for closer scrutiny is the "segmentation of citizenship" -- a robust feature that can be identified all across the post-communist region.  In line with the results of a pilot study (2012) on the specificities of local welfare in Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Romania, it is the "bifurcation-thesis" that the planned research intends to further elaborate on. According to this thesis, the post-communist transformation processes have concluded in the emerging of a modern, westernised welfare system around a rich understanding of citizenship for the middle and upper classes, while provisions for the poor are heavily ethnicised around a fragmented conceptualisation of citizenship and are delivered by cutting off the poor into sharply segregated and criminalised welfare ghettos. It is one of the major aims of the research to identify the historical path-dependencies as well as the intersecting forces of class, gender, and ethnicity in developing and maintaining such bifurcated structures. Given the broad theoretical framework of the endeavour and also Julia Szalai's intention to apply a multidisciplinary approach built on history, sociology, political science, and anthropology and cultural studies, she hopes for engaging in seminar-like discussions with interested colleauges and also with graduate students working in the field. At the same time, she offers her contribution in dicussing works that relate in one way or another to issues of poverty, ethnicity, citizenship, social policy, and the welfare state.