Team members

SustainAction

All of us are part of the research project "Sustaining Civil Society in the Context of Multiple Crises" (SustainAction) funded by the Baltic Sea Foundation and running 2023-2028.

Meet The Team

Dominika press_Miguel Vergara 2023_edite

Dominika V. Polanska

Professor in Social Work

Södertörn University, Sweden

Principal Investigator SustainAction

Dominika's research interests include social movements, civil society, housing policy, urban renewal, and housing activism. Much of her research has focused on urban movements in Poland and Sweden and her latest book is titled “Contentious Politics and the Welfare State: Squatting in Sweden” (Routledge, 2019). She has published books in Polish, Swedish and English, co-edited a number of special issues, and her latest research focus is on the phenomenon of “renovictions” in Sweden, covering the topic from the perspective of tenants and investigating the legal practice behind it. She has for long been engaged in issues covering the right to housing and tenants’ rights.

Elżbieta Korolczuk

Associate Professor in Sociology

Researcher at Södertörn University, Sweden & American Studies Center, Poland

Co-investigator SustainAction

Elżbieta's research interests involve social movements, civil society, politics of reproduction as well as right-wing populism and mobilizations against “gender”. She published two volumes on social movements and civil society in Central Eastern Europe: "Civil Society Revisited: Lessons from Poland" co-edited with Kerstin Jacobsson (Berghahn Books, 2017), "Rebellious Parents. Parental Movements in Central-Eastern Europe and Russia" co-edited with Katalin Fábián (Indiana University Press, 2017). Most recent publications include a monograph "Anti-gender Politics in the Populist Moment" written with Agnieszka Graff (2021, Routledge). She is also a commentator and a long-time women’s and human rights activist.

Michaela Pixová

Doctor of human geography

Researcher at the Faculty of Social Sciences at Charles University, Prague, and at the Institute for Development Research at BOKU, Vienna

Co-investigator SustainAction

Michaela's research interests include social movements, civic action and social-ecological transformation, food and urban studies, environmental crisis and feminism. She published on the right to the city and urban social movements in Czechia, including a monograph: "Contested Czech Cities: From Urban Grassroots to Pro-democratic Populism" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). She has authored research and monitoring reports on gender and intersectionality in the Czech climate movement, Czech climate politics, just transition in the built environment, water deprivatization, or homelessness and inclusion of the Roma. She is also a publisher, blogger and a long-time activist.

Luca Sára Bródy

Postdoctoral research fellow at KRTK Centre for Economic and Regional Studies, Hungary
Co-investigator SustainAction

Luca is an urban sociologist working on social movements and citizen mobilisation, state-civil society relations, urban-rural divides, local development, and food sovereignty initiatives. Her research has mainly taken place in Hungary, while her previous work has also focused on the cities of Barcelona, and Amsterdam. During her PhD, Luca was a visiting researcher at the University of Barcelona and the Central European University. She is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at the KRTK Centre for Economic and Regional Studies in Hungary. She is also a member of HerStory Collective, a Budapest-based feminist food-related research collaborative.

Ana Vilenica

Research Fellow with the University of Belgrade, Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory & a member of the Lab for Active Citizenship and Democratic Innovations and the Lab for the Theory, Creation and Politics of Space

Co-investigator SustainAction

Ana's work on urban, tenant, feminist, no-borders and anti-extractivis struggles has taken place in Eastern Europe, the UK and across Americas. She was a Research Fellow on the European Research Council project Inhabiting Radical Housing at the Polytechnic and University of Turin and a core member of the Beyond Inhabitation Lab.She was a winner of the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship awarded by the European Commission for a project focusing on housing deprivation and citizen initiatives for change. Vilenica was a Visiting Scholar at the University of New York Graduate Center's Center for Place, Culture and Politics, a research associate at the department of Urban Studies and Planning at the University of Sheffield and postdoctoral research fellow at the London South Bank University and the Academy of Art Novi Sad. Vilenica has edited five books, most recently "Urban Marginality, racialization and Interdependence: Learning from Eastern Europe" (2025), “Decoloniality in Eastern Europe: A Lexicon of Reorientation” (2023) and “Radical Housing: Art, Struggle, Care” (2021). She is a member of the Radical Housing Journal Editorial collective.

Ioana Florea

Senior researcher at the Babes-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca, and a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Gothenburg

Co-investigator SustainAction

Ioana is a sociologist working on urban transformations, financialization of housing, and social mobilizations responding to interconnected crises of social reproduction. Her recent publications include the co-authored and open access book "Contemporary Housing Struggles. A Structural Field of Contention Approach," with Agnes Gagyi and Kerstin Jacobsson (Palgrave, 2022), as well as one of the first critical articles about housing financialization in Romania, "Different Debtors, Different Struggles: Foreign-Currency Housing Loans and Class Tensions in Romania," with Mihail Dumitriu (Critical Housing Analysis, 2022). She is a founding member of Quantic Association, supporting social and economic rights initiatives in Romania since 2013, as well as a member of the Common Front for Housing Rights, in Bucharest.

Dorottya Fekete

Doctoral student in Social Work at Södertörn University, Sweden

Dorottya is a PhD student at Södertörn University. Her project looks at the mobilization of feminized occupation groups in Hungary and Sweden in the context of the care and democratic crisis. Previously, she worked at the Central European University Democracy Institute as a Research Assistant, involved in two projects. One is related to policymaking in de-democratizing contexts and the other is about the intersection of democratization struggles and gender equality. Dorottya received an MA degree in Gender Studies from the Central European University and an MSci degree in International Relations and Global Issues from the University of Nottingham.

Anna Ratecka
Sociologist
Post-doc in Social Work at Södertörn University, Sweden

Anna's research interests include sex workers' rights mobilisation and advocacy and sex work policy in Poland, as well as feminist theory and its relation to research practice. Her current project looks at strategies of belonging and othering within feminist mobilisations in Poland and Central and Eastern Europe. She defended her PhD thesis on sex workers' advocacy in Poland at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow. She was engaged in several research projects in areas such as policy on preventing gender-based violence in the Nordics, gender equality policies in R&D in CEE, migration and gender equality in intimate relationships. Anna was a visiting researcher at the Department of Criminology and Sociology of Law at the Univeristy of Oslo and the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies at the Oxford University. She has also been involved in local urban activism and sex workers' rights activist collectives in Poland.