Social Science Works is supported by an increasing group of Fellows.
Our fellows comprise a diverse, international group of scholars, mostly based in Germany, that share the core ideas behind Social Science Works.
They strive to contribute to the societal relevance of social science and to the quality of democratic decision making. For that account, they publish quality articles and blogs on our homepage targeting a broad audience and they can be hired by us to write second opinions on research about which they have expertise. Additionally, they regularly support our workshops – especially the ones on deliberation – as moderators and consultants.
Eva Singler M.A.
Eva Singler is a passionate professional with expertise in the field of migration, integration and diversity. She aims for understanding the complex interconnectedness of the local, national and global. Eva holds a Master’s degree in International Relations and Development Policies from the University of Duisburg-Essen and a Bachelor’s degree in Hispanic Studies majoring in Political Sciences from the University of Regensburg and the Universidad Complutense of Madrid. Her research expertise focuses on policy effectiveness, evidence-based policy making and the migration development nexus.
She is an experienced practitioner. She volunteered in Ecuador and worked as a Project Manager for the German Development Cooperation on the subjects of skilled migration, diaspora cooperation and migration policy advice. Currently, she works as a Special Officer for the city administration of Frankfurt a.M. on the issues of integration, diversity and anti-discrimination. She is trained in workshop facilitation and non-violent communication. By joining deliberations she actively wants to contribute to promoting democratic values and challenging anti-pluralist thinking. She enjoys feminist literature and podcasts, hiking and hatha yoga.
Florentin Münstermann BA
Florentin Münstermann is a German graduate of the Erasmus School of Economics Rotterdam, currently living Potsdam. He holds a Bachelor in Economics and Business Economics, with a focus in Political Economics. Throughout his life he acquired a lot of international and multicultural experiences, which range from living a year abroad in Beijing, studying at an international school in Berlin and participating in an exchange semester at Bocconi University Milan during his bachelor studies in Rotterdam. Flo’s political interests stem from the increasingly controversial political debates and crisis around the globe. He rounded off his Bachelor with a thesis on the topic of political enfranchisement, voting behaviors of expatriate voters and their changing roles modern political campaigns. Currently, Flo is finishing his Masters at Erasmus University Rotterdam. Flo is also interested in sports and music, and holds a certficate in Music Production and Sound Engineering from dBs Berlin.
Jannes Jacobsen is a sociologist working on migration, integration and survey methodology. He is currently doing his doctorate in sociology at the Humboldt University Berlin. He also works at the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) at the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW). Jannes completed his bachelor’s degree in social sciences and philosophy at the University of Leipzig and moved to the Free University Berlin for the master’s degree. There he earned the Master of Arts in Sociology.
Above all, Jannes is interested in the conditions under which people have to migrate and find their way in their new home land. In addition, he investigates migration-specific problems in the collection and analysis of quantitative data. Jannes is convinced that the survey methodology must play a greater role in the development and dissemination of empirically based knowledge than has been the case so far, so that also people outside of science can gain a sound and critical picture of empirical findings.
Anne Flake MA
Anne Flake is a recent Public Policy graduate of the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin. Before joining the Hertie School of Governance, Anne majored in International Development (BA) at Leiden University College, and worked at local NGOs in Turkey, Myanmar and the Netherlands. Anne previously worked with GIZ for a multisector programme aimed at strengthening the resilience of refugees and host-communities in Syria’s neighbouring countries. For her master thesis, Anne conducted field research in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq to study the concept of procedural legitimacy in the interaction between local (government) stakeholders and external aid actors.
Anne is specifically interested in challenges related to inclusive education, (forced) migration, governance in areas of limited statehood, human rights in authoritarian and conflict-affected contexts, and social policy. She believes that deliberation and participatory approaches to policy-making are valuable tools to building more inclusive societies – be they in Germany, the Netherlands or beyond.
Isabel Navarro BA
Isabel Navarro was our Spanish intern for the summer of 2019. Isabel comes from a small town in Valencia and is currently studying International Studies and Law at Carlos III University of Madrid. Her studies are strongly interdisciplinary: sociology, politics, statistics, demography, globalization and economy. She also studied the law. Some of her main interests are inequalities, democracy, and minority and women’s rights.
Her cultural curiosity brought her to attend several courses in Germany and Austria over the past years, and to participating in several volunteering projects in Spain. Although her home University is in Madrid, she has spent two exchange semesters at the Charles University in Prague and two semesters at the University of Valencia. Isabel finishes her studies in 2020 and she spend the summer of 2019 improving her understanding of democracy, deliberation, populism and German culture. at SSW she especially devoted time to analyze the statistical data gathered over the last couple of years by Social Science Works.
Paul Börsting graduated from Tilburg University in Netherlands with a bachelor degree in “Liberal Arts and Sciences” majoring in Social Sciences. During his interdisciplinary study he focused on a diverse number of topics mainly in the realm of political sciences and sociology, such as migration, identity, international relations, the European Union and political theory. He finished his degree with a bachelor thesis on the expectations, motivations and effects of volunteering by refugees in Germany. In the first half of 2018, Paul was an intern at Social Science Works. Currently, he finishes his Masters at the Freie Universität Berlin and the Sciences Po in Paris.
Besides that, Paul enjoys getting to know other cultures and people – may it be on his travels, during his one year volunteer service in South India, in international workcamps or during his exchange semester in Hong Kong. Additionally, he enjoys music, company, food, hiking and podcasts.
Emma Eden BA
Emma Eden is a Palestinian Israeli graduate from Max Stern Yezreel Valley College in Israel. She studied Psychology and Criminology as part of her dual subject bachelor. During her studies, Emma participated in Model United Nations (MUN) that prepares students to debate social and political topics in conferences all over the world. She worked with youth in distress for 3 years, gathering perspectives on complex social issues. Furthermore, as an Arab woman growing up in Israel she observed the Israeli – Palestinian conflict from both sides and from different perspectives. She examined this in her BA thesis on the integration of Arab female students in Israel. This integration creates an ethnic identity dilemma and Emma analyzed their way of coping with it. Additionally, Emma led a workshop bridging Arab and Jewish students and encouraging them to open a conversation touching on both their issues and concerns. She is currently in Germany, and is researching forced emigration and human rights from a social cognitive perspective.
Oktay Tuncer MA
Oktay Tuncer is a master student Social Sciences at the Humboldt-University of Berlin. Oktay completed his Undergraduate degree in the same field studying both in Berlin and in Paris. At Humboldt University he received a far-reaching education in quantitative and qualitative research methods. At the Nanterre University of Paris he acquired important theoretical insights in sub fields of sociology like socio-anthropology, political sociology and sociology of economic thinking.
Oktay gained supplementary experience in academia by working as a student assistent in research institutes such as the German Institute of Economic Research (DIW, Deutsches Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung) and the Berlin Social Science Research Center (WZB, Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung).
In his studies, he focused on political and economic sociology, the sociology of inequality and research methods. The topic of his Bachelor thesis was the notion of nationality and citizenship in Turkey. For this he analyzed the ongoing debate on a new constitution. Throughout his experiences in academia, Oktay faced the problems and obstacles of relevant, valuable and legitimate empirical research. This motivated him to become an associate of Social Science Works.
Namitha has always been severely curious about systems and the way they work. This led her to finish a masters in Physics from Chennai, India and more recently graduate with a masters in International Relations and Cultural Diplomacy from Furtwangan University in the Schwarzwald. Her master thesis examined the effects of the migration crisis on post-war German national identity.
She spent the first half of 2019 working at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. This experience highlighted the need to establish strong multisectoral partnerships and retain the relevance of academia in becoming tangible to civil society. At Social Science Works she has set out to do just that. She has studied conflicts of various kinds in India, Germany and Israel and is interested in identity politics, gender theory, forced migration and statelessness, and social hierarchy. In her free time she enjoys marathon walks in forests, rowing, meeting people over numerous cups of ginger tea and attempts to conquer the infamously hard German language.
Ole Oeltjen is a political scientist. After receiving his BA from Freiburg University he studied an MA at the Free University of Berlin. In his MA thesis Ole analyzed the role of camp operators in the accommodation of asylum seekers in Berlin. Subsequently, he worked at the Humboldt University of Berlin and at Bielefeld University, where he did research on local migration control.
Besides migration and asylum policies, Ole is interested in the relationship and tensions between citizenship, civil rights and security policies, which he especially focused on during a semester at the University of Copenhagen. Furthermore, he spent a semester at the New University of Lisbon and completed an internship at the Friedrich-Ebert-Foundation’s office in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. Ole is currently pursuing a second degree in law studies at the Humboldt University of Berlin.
Anna Provan MA
Anna graduated with a first class degree in International Relations from The University of Edinburgh before pursuing an MSc in Social and Cultural Anthropology at University College London (UCL). For her master’s thesis, she completed a two-month period of fieldwork among a subculture of Black and Latino LGBTQ+ individuals in New York City, using ethnographic methods to understand more about the concerns of racialised sexual minorities in the urban context.
Since moving to Berlin, she has been working with a number of non-profit organisations concerned with critical research, development and advocacy. Anna’s primary research interests lie in intersectional feminism, queer theory, conflict and migration.
Alessia Arbustini MA
Alessia is a Master student of Gender Studies with special reference to the Middle East at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London. She holds a BA in Anthropology, Religion and Oriental Civilization at University of Bologna, Italy. Her main research interests lie in queer and feminist diaspora studies, migration and displacement, gender issues related to new nationalisms and feminist and queer knowledge production. She has always been actively involved in grassroots and local organizations concerning topics such as human trafficking, sexuality, gender performance, and migration. She is currently working on her MA thesis on the representation of Muslim women (and men) by right-wing propaganda in Italy.
Phillip Reißenweber MA
Phillip Reißenweber is a political scientist and doctoral candidate at the University of Greifswald. During the course of his study his main area of interest comprised contemporary questions of political theory as well as questions of methodology and research designs. He is also a communications coach, trained in Nonviolent Communication based on the approach by Marshall B. Rosenberg. His experience with this approach towards intra- as well as interpersonal conflict resolution, with its emphasis on emotions and needs, led him to believe that emotional development is an important prerequisite for the accomplishment of democratic values like political equality and social justice. In his M.A. thesis he brought political science and Nonviolent Communication together by analysing the connections between cognitive-evaluative theories of emotions and the principles behind representative democracy. His PhD thesis partly continues this project by analysing the role of emotions in political deliberation and investigating possible designs for real-world deliberative settings. Settings which are capable to integrate even subtle aspects of emotionality into public discourse. Besides all that Phillip is a passionate Balfolk dancer, he loves to read novels, cycling and he enjoys listening to music.
Jeanne Lenders MA
Jeanne graduated with distinction for her Master in European Studies at King’s College London, after spending the final semester at the Humboldt University in Berlin. She also holds a first-class Bachelor’s degree in English Language and Culture from the Radboud University Nijmegen. For her Master’s thesis, she conducted semi-structured interviews with young, male Afghan asylum seekers in Berlin, focussing on their displacement experience and views on German culture and gender relations. Previously, she has volunteered for the Boat Refugee Foundation in Lesvos, where she coordinated an Afghan women’s support group. Next to that, she contributed as a research assistant to a human-rights think tank in Malta and completed a training on refugee inclusion in Southern Italy. Her main research interests lie in social coherence, the power dynamics between majority and minority populations, and the gendered aspects of forced migration.
Akram Yacob MA
Akram Yacob graduated from the Hertie School of Governance with a Master in Public Policy. After spending 6 months at the United Nations Volunteers in Bonn, he wrote his thesis on the topic of improving social media stakeholder engagement using Big Data, Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence. Prior to that, he graduated from the Singapore Management University with a Bachelor of Social Science, majoring in Sociology and Corporate Communication. Over the years, his research interests have gravitated towards technology, urbanization and development.
Born and raised in Singapore, he worked for several years in the government in Singapore. Additionally, he has been part of several start-ups from public-service platforms to decentralized AI platforms. He loves animals and has spent time volunteering with the Animal Concerns Research and Education Society (Singapore) and the Animal Care Center of NYC (ACC).
Mariana Zarpellon BA
Mariana Zarpellon graduated from Universidade Federal do Paraná with a bachelor’s degree in Social Sciences, majoring in Anthropology and Archaeology. During her studies, she worked at the university’s archaeological laboratory (CEPA) and did fieldwork with the people living at an abandoned construction site at her hometown in Brazil. Throughout the four years in which the research took place, many topics were brought up by the relation she stablished with her interlocutors, such as homelessness, statelessness, substance dependency and social marginalization. The field research eventually led to the production of an ethnographic film called Fala de Mim, which was later evaluated in her graduation monograph.
She has a previous bachelor’s degree in Social Communication and has worked as a photographer since 2008.
Raíssa Silveira MA
Raíssa is a Brazilian Masters student for Political Science at Universidade Federal de Pernambuco – Brazil, currently in Germany to expand her research on modern antisemitism. She is a BA in International Relations and a former intern for her country’s Ministry of Foreign Relations on Human Rights issues. Raíssa was also a volunteer for Palestinians’ rights and she specialized in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, when her desire to advocate against antisemitism also arose. Furthermore, she has interest for democracy studies, international organizations, media studies, forced migration, MENA studies, theology and political philosophy. She will take part in the Brazilian delegation to TUFTS University – Boston Symposium on Migration in a Turbulent World. She loves travelling and learning languages, and looks forward to developing relevant and accessible research.
Abdulrahman Kadi BA
Abdulrahman is a Master student of Cultural Science at the FU Berlin, studying the intellectual encounters among the three religions in the medieval Islamic world. He holds a Bachelor degree in Economics/Business Administration from Aleppo University in Syria, which he insisted to finish during the most dangerous phase of the Syrian war.
Abdulrahman started his social involvement at the age of 17 as a volunteer at Albirr association in Homs- Syria. As the Syrian crisis started, he became a Junior-Trainer of Life Skills program certified by UNICEF. In addition to that he volunteered at the Syrian Red Crescent as a health promoter and joined the Syrian Network for Building Peace.
Later on, he moved to Lebanon where he worked with different NGOs in the fields of education and relief, and finally joined a United Nation agency (UNRWA) as a social mobilizer working with the Palestinian refugee communities.
Finally, at 2016, he moved to Berlin to pursue his postgraduate studies. Abdulrahman is also interested in arts; he paints, makes photos, videos, does some voice acting, and used to sing in the Berlin State Opera’s choir. When he has free time left he enjoys cooking and eating.
Zacky Khairul Umam studied Middle Eastern languages and cultures in Jakarta, Canberra, and Istanbul before coming to Berlin as a Ph.D. candidate for the global intellectual history of early modern Islam at the Freie Universität Berlin (2014 until now). His popular essays on Islam, democracy, Middle Eastern cultures, pluralism, and social thought have been published in major Indonesian media since his undergraduate studies. During Fall 2018, he obtained a Global Humanities Junior Fellowship at the Comparative Thought and Literature Department of the Johns Hopkins University in the US. He is affiliated to Indonesia für Deutschland (indonesiafuerdeutschland.com), a social project to “retribute” to marginalized German societies.
Uwe Ruß MA
Uwe is a sociologist and philosopher. Currently, he is finishing his Ph.D. thesis on the relationship between people’s attitudes towards the welfare state and their support for the political system in their country. Prior to that Uwe has worked as research associate and lecturer at the Institute of Sociology at Freie Universität Berlin, where he was giving courses on empirical social research, sociological theory, and statistical data analysis. His research interests lie within the fields of social inequality, the sociology of education, and political attitudes.
During his studies at the University of Göttingen, Uwe spend a year abroad at Uppsala University for the study of sociology, history, and Holocaust and genocide studies, and volunteered at the Swedish Committee Against Antisemitism. He conducted his Magister thesis on meritocratic beliefs, educational inequalities, and the income distribution in modern welfare states at the Berlin Social Science Center (WZB) under the supervision of Heike Solga.
Asaf is a PhD candidate at the iDTR (Institute for Dark Tourism Research) at the University of Central Lancashire. Focusing on the large yet under-researched dark tourism segment in Berlin, his research is concerned with tour guides’ interpretation, in their role as mediators or ‘Ambassadors of the City’ (Botschafter der Stadt).
Prior to moving to Berlin, Asaf graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Ecotourism from the University of Central Lancashire. In his final thesis, he compared the roles and responsibilities of private and NGO ecotourism stakeholders in Ethiopia. In Berlin’s Humboldt University’s Agriculture and Horticulture Faculty, Asaf completed a master degree in Integrated Natural Resource Management (environmental economics). For his master thesis, as part of the LILAC project (Living Landscapes China), he researched socio-environmental coevolution within the team’s focus on adoption of agricultural innovations in the Nabanhe Nature Reserve, China.
His choice of research topics, as well as his interest in Social Science Works, derives from his wish to find the balance between adding to scientific knowledge, and making that knowledge useful, accessible, and common outside the academic circles.
Christina Pao is an undergraduate at Yale University, currently pursuing an Intensive B.A. in Classics (Ancient Greek and Latin) and petitioning a joint B.A./M.A. in Political Science. Her primary research surrounds attitudinal change towards refugees and strategies of prejudice-reduction in the U.S., Germany, and Japan through the framework of Contact Theory. She has recently been expanding this research to encompass the study of volunteer culture, youth activism, and community-based integration.
Outside of academia, Christina has worked for the International Rescue Committee (IRC) as a youth summer school co-lead, the Integrated and Refugee Immigrant Services (IRIS) as a subsidized housing caseworker, and in the office of U.S. Senator Patty Murray as an immigration caseworker. She believes strongly in the practical power of academic theory and hopes to continue uniting her work in direct service to her research.
Sergiu Lucaci is a PhD fellow in political science at the Bremen International Graduate School of Social Sciences. Upon receiving his BA degree from Jacobs University Bremen, he has pursued master studies at Cardiff University and Humboldt University Berlin. With a general interest in social and political theory, Sergiu is currently researching particular forms of civil society activity in the European Union in the aftermath of the financial crisis. His focus is on networks of non-governmental organizations that try to attain the status of legitimate contributors to the field of financial regulation. From a theoretical angle emphasizing the role of knowledge production, he seeks to uncover how civil society advocacy in a technical policy field is structured by the EU politico-administrative order through its various uses of outside expertise.
Alexandra is currently in her third year at the University of Copenhagen, studying political science. In the Autumn of 2017, she has been on exchange in Birmingham, UK. In the winter of 2017 she was a very appreciated intern at Social Science Works. Before Copenhagen, she spent a year studying political science at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, PA in the US. In the States, Alexandra became increasingly interested in social inequality. This stay also peaked her interest in international politics in general, but mostly regarding war and military interventions, as well as the immigration it creates. The impact these international forces have on democracy within states and the EU, is thus something she finds urgently relevant to study today. Altogether, the interconnectedness of war, inequality, and democracy is why she studies political science.
Sarah Coughlan is co-founder of Social Science Works. She earned her MA at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin in 2014 where her thesis looked at educational inequality and the policy discourse that surrounds the debate. During her MA she worked on issues relating to housing and social policy as well as the question of ‘usable knowledge’ and the role of social science in the wider world. Before coming to the HU in 2012, she studied European Social and Political Studies at University College London where she specialized political philosophy and Italian, and spent a year studying in Rome. Her primary interests at Social Science Works are education, housing and social issues and the misuse of research that empowers poor policy, particularly in her native Britain; she is interested above all else in inequality in all its forms. Her motivation in joining Social Science Works stems from frustration in the academy’s inability to make any meaningful inroads into society’s biggest issues and resistance to anything that attempts to go beyond incremental change.
Daniel Meehan is a researcher and impact consultant with special interests in civil society, big data, migration and collective impact. After studying Anthropology and Social Sciences in London, Ankara, Berlin and Istanbul he has worked for the last four years in Berlin with a wide variety of organisations, developing impact strategies, running evaluations and impact measurement, and carrying out social innovation projects for, amongst others, the Berliner Senat, the GIZ, the European Commission, UNOSDP and UN Women. He has taught impact oriented project design at the Free University of Berlin, the Alice Salomon University of Social Work and the Washington University of St Louis. Currently he is developing new tools to simplify impact measurement for civil society organisations and increase capacity for production and analysis of socially relevant data.
Jada Lindblom is a doctoral student at Arizona State University in Phoenix, Arizona, USA, in the School of Community Resources and Development. She serves as a research assistant at the University’s Center for Sustainable Tourism (https://scrd.asu.edu/sustainabletourism). Among her varied research interests, she investigates residents’ sense of place and pride in tourism settings, tourism development in post-war regions, and the significant tourism roles filled by people who work in the periphery of the industry. Her academic pursuits have arisen in part from her experiences as a practitioner in outdoor recreation and adventure tourism, in which she observed the educational and psychological benefits of travel and leisure, but also the considerable environmental and cultural detriments of the industry. She received a B.A. in Environmental Studies from Scripps College (Claremont, California) and a M.S. in Parks, Recreation and Tourism from the University of Utah.
Darine Atassi is an American graduate from the University of California Irvine, with two Bachelor’s degree in Political Science and International Studies with an emphasis on Conflict Resolution. Darine participated in study abroad programs both in Istanbul, Turkey and Berlin, Germany along with participating in peace initiative programs in the South Caucasus and the Middle East. Her travels and background have allowed her to be particularly interested in migration studies and the role of civil society in conflict zones.
Philipp Gerlach is a behavioral scientist with a strong interest in evidence-based policy-making advice. He graduated with a distinction in psychology from Cambridge University and with “very good” in social science from Humboldt University. Throughout his studies, Philipp has worked for both applied and fundamental research institutes prior to commencing his current position as a doctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development. His dissertation investigates the conditions under which people conform to social norms: moral rules that promote or prohibit actions by telling us what ought to be done and what to expect from others. To address this question, he uses quantitative statistical tools to analyze large experimental data sets.
Over decades, the behavioral sciences have generated valuable tools that enable people to make better decisions for themselves. Examples include improving (boosting) people’s capacities for exercising their own agency and designing choice environments that steer (nudge) people to make better decisions whilst preserving choice. In recent years, public officials have grown interested in using these tools to promote policy goals. To some degree, boosting and nudging can serve as alternatives to classic regulatory and fiscal means, such as laws and incentives. In particular, nudging has been increasingly applied to various domains of daily life – with both opportunities and risks for the civil society. Philipp is looking forward to contributing his expertise in behaviorally informed interventions and data science to the knowledge base of Social Science Works.
Christian Kipp currently studies mathematics at TU Berlin. He holds a master’s degree in Social Science from HU Berlin. In his master’s thesis in Social Science, Christian discussed Ernest Gellner’s theory of nationalism from a philosophical perspective. The topic of his bachelor’s thesis in mathematics is at the intersection of geometric functional analysis and statistics. Christian’s support of SSW is based on the belief that science and democracy should be understood as two aspects of humanism, which can only exist as a unity.
Christian’s approach to social science is based on the conviction that scientific analysis of social mechanisms is a necessary condition for progressive social change based on reason and open discussion. He is discontent with the prevalence of various forms of obscurantism in the social sciences: whereas mathematical obscurantism tries to conceal theoretical poverty under a veneer of seemingly sophisticated, but pointless mathematical mumbo-jumbo, classical “soft” obscurantism deceives the reader by means of vague and confusing language. What the social sciences need is less pretentiousness and more clarity, not only to foster their internal communication, but also to gain impact outside of academia.
Michael Häfelinger MA
Michael Häfelinger is economist, sociologist, and health care researcher. He works as a business consultant (www.unternehmercoaches.de) and is the Managing Director of the Berlin Institute for public health (www.biph.de).
His academic heart beats for equal opportunities. At TOPOS city research he was jointly responsible for the determination of rent ceilings in redevelopment and environmental protection areas. He also developed the set of indicators for the social report of the State of Brandenburg. Later he worked at the Robert-Koch-Institute on the poverty and wealth report of the Federal Government and co-designed the federal health survey.
These predominantly analytical level he left with entering the Berlin Institute for Public Health. Here he devotes himself to the implementation of health promotion measures in the workplace and city neighborhoods. As a management consultant for cooperation, he is specialized in participation and esteeming communication in corporations.
Dr. Sergiu Buscaneanu is a visiting researcher at the Institute for European Integration, University of Hamburg, where he works on a book concerned with the dynamics of political regimes in the Eastern neighborhood of the EU. The book, which is due to be published in 2016 with Palgrave Macmillan, argues that the EU’s democratization role in Eastern neighborhood was weak over the period 1991-2014, but where such a weak role was present, it was only under four domestic and transnational conditions: (a) a higher cost-benefit balance of norm adoption; (b) a lower structural difficulty (e.g. effects of oil rents) a given country would need to overcome on its way towards democratization; (c) increased levels of power dispersion and political representation; and (d) a higher extent of democratic diffusion resulting from regional interactions.
Sergiu’s research interests lie at the intersection of comparative politics with international relations. His primary areas of academic interest are EU external governance, democratization, regime dynamics, democratic diffusion, democratic theory, former Soviet Union, European Neighborhood Policy, Eastern Partnership and prospect theory, while the secondary ones include EU enlargement, fuzzy set Qualitative Comparative Analysis and concept building.
Sergiu Buscaneanu joined Social Science Works, because he is concerned with how actually social science works. He has completed an MA (2006) in EU politics at the University of Leeds and a PhD (2014) in political science at the BGSS, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Sergiu serves as a country expert for the “V-Dem” project and has been a Chevening, EMECW and DAAD scholar.
Lily Cichanowicz is currently doing her MA at Freie Universität Berlin where her research focuses on trajectories of capitalism, modern regimes, and emergent social movements. She earned her bachelor’s degree from Cornell University in 2015 where she studied Development Sociology with a concentration in Inequality studies. She has spent time living, working, and studying in numerous countries across Europe, Latin America, and Southeast Asia, experiences which also inform her approach and contributions to projects at Social Science Works.
Niklas Kossow is a political scientist with a focus on anti-corruption policies and the use of new technologies in mobilizing anti-corruption movements. He holds a BA in European Social and Political Studies from University College London and a Master of Public Policy from the Hertie School of Governance, Berlin. Having worked as a Mercator Fellow on International Affairs, he recently returned to the Hertie School to work on his PhD thesis. Additionally, Niklas is the Communications Officer of the EU FP7 ANTICORRP Project at the European Research Center for Anti-Corruption and State Building. Previously he gained work experience at the German Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs, the German Foreign Office and the Social Science Research Centre Berlin (WZB). He previously worked as a researcher for Transparency International, Freedom House, the United Nations Development Programme and the World Wide Web Foundation. His experience as a researcher led him to support high quality and honest research aimed at improving public policy. Adding to his keen interest in anti-corruption work he loves to travel and has a strong affection for Eastern Europe and the Post-Soviet sphere. He regularly shares his thoughts on twitter @niklaskossow.
Johannes Kuhnert is an MA student in Political Theory at Goethe University Frankfurt Main. He has previously studied European Social and Political Studies at University College London and has been an exchange student at the University of Bologna and the New School for Social Research in New York. Currently, he is on the way to finishing his thesis on The Moral Economy of Financial Consultancy. During his studies, his interest progressively moved from political and social philosophy towards qualitative social research. As a result of this, Johannes has adopted ‘praxeography’, conversation and discourse analysis as his preferred mode of research, but he remains equally preoccupied with the conceptual foundations of sociology. Systems theory and Science and Technology Studies are his major reference points for the integration of his empirical and conceptual interests. He believes that radical constructivist stories can spur reflexivity in complex, knowledge-based societies in much the same way that modern philosophy used to in the past. He is glad to join Social Science Works to discuss his ideas with like-minded.
Johannes Petry is a political economist currently working on finance. He did his BA in Political Science and Economics at Goethe University Frankfurt, starting to integrate his knowledge from both disciplines. In order to further this interdisciplinary approach, he did an MA in International Political Economy at the University of Warwick and an MA Politics & Public Administration at the University of Konstanz.
Throughout his studies, he specialised in issues of political economy. Empirically, on the critical analysis of finance, crises and emerging markets in the context of a global economy. Theoretically, by combining different schools of research to overcome disciplinary boundaries and further an integrated approach to the study of society, politics and the economy. During and after his studies he worked as a teaching and research assistant at various universities and did an internship at the Institut für Sozialforschung.
During the research for his dissertation on varieties of financialisation he conducted a series of interviews with financial market actors and hereby realised how different the views from regulators and bankers are from academics, and how little some academics seem to understand finance and hence are unable to substantially criticise it. To avoid this fallacy, he decided to work in finance for two years before going back to academia. He is now doing a PhD at the University of Warwick, analysing the transformation of Chinese capital markets, incorporating his experiences as a financial analyst and political economist.
Johannes is worried about the current state of social science research which is mainly driven by methodological and theoretical debates and constrained by disciplinary boundaries. He believes that three aspects are of vital importance for good social science research: it should be empirically grounded and methodologically sound; it should be interdisciplinary as well as critical; and its results should be relevant for society. Because of this he is glad to be part of Social Science Works.
Paula Herrera is a Public Policy candidate at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin. She is convinced that civil society and its think tanks are key players in the formation of fair, creative and active societies. Connected to this, policy-making must be developed hand-in-glove with a profound reflection on the means of achieving efficient results.
Before arriving to Germany in 2015, Paula worked at the Trade Commission of France in Mexico as an intern for Aeronautical and Security issues, where she helped to facilitate personalized market studies to the French private sector. Previously, Paula worked in different prominent non-governmental institutions; namely at the Colegio de México as a fellow researcher, and at OXFAM LAC, as an assistant of both HR and Business Management departments. Moreover, she has collaborated with the Centro de Estudios Espinosa Yglesias, which is a Mexican non-profit civil association, whose mission is to enrich political debate with policy advice and shed light on governmental decision-processes. Furthermore, in her spare time Paula is an active supporter of the LGBT minority’s organizations.
She holds a BA in Political Science from the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (2009-2012), where she graduated with special honours after presenting a thesis that analyses the relationship between the electoral reforms, the economical positions and the degree of democracy of the different Venezuelan regimes. During her BA, Paula travelled to France for an exchange semester at Science Po Strasbourg, where she took several courses related to European Institutions and their contemporary challenges. Thanks to her multicultural upbringing, she is at home in the English, French and Spanish language and culture. Nowadays, she is learning German.
Ilyas Saliba is a research fellow at the Research Unit on Democracy and Democratization at the Berlin Social Science Center (WZB) and a PhD candidate at the Berlin Graduate School for Social Sciences (BGSS) at Humboldt University Berlin. He holds a BA from the University of Hamburg in political Science and a MA in Comparative and international Studies from the ETH (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) and University of Zurich.
Ilyas’ research lies at the intersection of comparative politics, international relations and regional studies on Middle Eastern politics & societies. He is working on a topic from a comparative political science angle but building on and communicating to other disciplinary fields. The problems he encounters as a consequence of this has motivated him to rethink some of the fundamental assumptions and paradigms that dominate the social sciences.
In his dissertation he explores political decision making and strategies of incumbent regimes and governments during times of public contestation in Morocco and Egypt.
Patrick Sullivan is a 2018 Master of Public Policy candidate at the Hertie School of Governance. Originally from Milwaukee, Wisconsin in the United States, he has Bachelor’s degrees in Economics, Secondary Education, Political Science and History from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and participated in an exchange semester at Bocconi University in Milan, Italy during his time as an undergraduate. He credits his time abroad for making him a more empathetic, curious, and worldly person. Following his Bachelor’s, he taught courses in Economics, Government, and History –and coached American Football and Golf- in the Shorewood School District in Milwaukee. The areas of study that he is particularly passionate about include wealth and income inequality, behavioral economics, and American politics. Patrick was an intern at Social Science Works in 2017.
Sylvia Joss holds an M.A. in cultural studies. She is passionate about languages and cultures as well as practical questions in the field of migration and integration. Of special interest to her are inclusion, participation, anti-discrimination and anti-racism. Sylvia obtained her Bachelor´s degree in social anthropology and psychology from the University of Bern and successfully finished a Master’s program in cultural studies at Sabanci University in Istanbul. She has been working in Germany and Switzerland in projects on labor market integration, anti-discrimination and participation.
Alper Baysan is a political scientist interested in European politics, human rights and democracy. He is personally invested in knowledge transfer between science and society. Alper holds a Bachelor’s in Political Science from the University of Bielefeld, a Master’s from Sabanci University Istanbul, and a second Master’s degree in international studies from ETH Zurich. Alper currently works as a research associate at the German Institute for Human Rights. He also edits and translates texts as a freelancer (www.baysan.eu). Previously, Alper worked as a research associate with the Berlin Institute for Population and Development and project lead with the Consumer Protection Organization Berlin. You can follow Alper on Twitter where he tweets on societal issues (@alboom1).
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