Every year, JUST SOCIETY hosts several international research fellows.
You can find current and previous research fellows below, along with why they applied for the JUST SOCIETY research fellow grant and what they gained from their stay.
2024
Aia Beraia (current)
May-June 2024
Aia Beraia is a PhD student in Practical Philosophy at the University of Münster (Germany) and Ilia State University (Georgia). In her dissertation, her focus is on the problem of the crisis of liberal democracy and in response to this global crisis, she proposes ‘feminist democracy’ – the model which is constructed by looking into the theoretical flaws and weaknesses of normative liberal theory, the foundational ideas of liberal democracy, and offers their reconstruction in feminist terms. The work is mainly in the sphere of political philosophy, though the author also makes use of ethical theories. In JUST SOCIETY Aia will work on a research paper where she will investigate how feminist ethics can contribute to the theories of egalitarian distributive justice and what alternative models of distributive justice can be proposed on the basis of feminist ethics theories.
Bárbara Torres Garcia
April-May 2024
Bárbara Torres García is a postdoctoral researcher in the area of Labour and Social Security Law at the University of Santiago de Compostela. Bárbara is a member of the labour law network “CIELO Laboral”, of which she is a member of its executive committee. In recent years, her main line of research has been the occupational health and safety of workers in the context of the digitalisation, her thesis topic being the prevention of occupational risks in teleworking. She has also carried out studies on the application in Spain of ILO regulatory instruments, vocational training and the regulation of the use of time. Precisely, Barbara will work in JUST SOCIETY on the latter topic, discussing with her mentor possible ideas on how the regulation of working time could contribute to the achievement of a fairer and more sustainable society.
2023
Vitor Matheus Oliveira de Menezes
October-November
Vitor Matheus Oliveira de Menezes is a senior analyst on education policies at Unibanco Institute (Brazil) and has a PhD in Sociology from University of São Paulo. He is also currently working as a consultant for UNESCO on the project “Promoção e Fortalecimento da Cidadania no Brasil”. Whilst here, Vitor will work on a project, which investigates the trends and characteristics of the Brazilian welfare system in the first half of the 2020s. This is a continuation of his PhD, which addressed an historicization of the Brazilian welfare system from the 1890’s to the 2010s.
Siddardha Darla
September-October 2023
Read Siddardha' blog "'Air of Legality' and Unjust Governance: Law Struggles in Andhra Pradesh, India"
Hangala Siachiwena
September 2023
Hangala Siachiwena is a postdoctoral researcher with the Institute for Democracy, Citizenship and Public Policy in Africa (IDCPPA), at the University of Cape Town (UCT), where he is part of the Social Policy and Afrobarometer Data Management research teams. Hangala is a member of the Zambia Elections Research Network and work with the University of Gothenberg’s program on Governance and Local Development. Hangala obtained a DPhil from UCT’s Sociology department, for a thesis that focused on how and why changes of government affect policy making on social cash transfer programs in Malawi and Zambia. His research methods combine qualitative process-tracing and quantitative household survey data methods and his interests include social protection, social policy, public policy, the politics of development, and elections and democracy. During his stay at SDU, Hangala will be working on research papers on social cash transfer in Malawi and Zambia, building on his PhD, which he will present in workshops and seminars at the Danish Centre for Welfare studies. Together with his mentor Ane, he will discuss potential research ideas for future collaboration between JUST SOCIETY and the IDCPPA.
Read Hangala's blog "COVID-19, Social Relief, and the Informal Sector: Attitudes towards fairness in the distribution of benefits in Zambia"
Read more about Hangala here.
Odile Mackett
April-May 2023
Odile Mackett is a Senior Lecturer at the University of the Witwatersrand’s School of Governance. She has a PhD and a MCom in Applied Development Economics from the University of the Witwatersrand in addition to a BA International Studies (majoring Politics & Economics) and a BCom (Hons) in International Trade and Finance from the University of Johannesburg. She is a labour and feminist economist and her research interests are related to the division, quality, and definition of both paid and unpaid work, how households and families are structured and formed around these types of work, and how the state interacts with households and the market to reinforce the gendered and racial division of work. She has broadly written on social security, poverty, and inequality specifically as these factors relate to gender inequalities in society.
Read Odile's blog "Present children and absent parents: Why we need to know more about skip-generation households in South Africa and beyond."
Read more about Odile here
2022
Chibuikem Nnaeme
September-October 2022
Chibuikem obtained a doctorate in Development Studies from the University of Johannesburg in 2019 within the research topics: social grants, developmental agency and livelihood improvements of beneficiaries. In 2020, he obtained a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Johannesburg. His research has been published in renowned academic journals including World Development, Journal of International Development, Development in Practice, and Development Southern Africa in his areas of research interests including social policy, development, agency, and informal economy. During his visit to SDU in 2022, he intends to research the legal consequences of the South African Social Security Agency's outsourcing of social grant payments to private businesses. SASSA could be argued to have abdicated her statutory responsibility at the hands of profit-oriented entities who construed vulnerable citizens as markets to be exploited.
Alberto Carvalho Amaral
August-September 2022
Alberto Carvalho Amarala is a doctoral candidate in Sociology at the University of Brasília and a public defender at the Public Defender's Office of the Federal District with a master’s degree in law. His doctoral work concerns access to justice for socially vulnerable groups. During his stay at SDU, Alberto will study access to justice within the judicial system with particular regard to the definition of the sociological category “needy” (individual or collective – in Brazilian Portuguese, “necessitado”), which is a central eligibility criterion within the Brazilian Public Defender's Office. In addition, he intends to participate in classes, academic activities, networks of studies on socio-legal issues within his field. Alberto is also the editor-in-chief of the Journal of the Public Defender's Office of the Federal District and coordinator of the Training Course for Popular Defenders of Brazilian Federal District, aimed at training community leaders in poor regions about human rights.
Thandiwe Matthews
May-June 2022
Thandiwe Matthews is a South African attorney and doctoral candidate forming part of a joint scholarship programme between the University of the Witwatersrand (under the South African Research Chair in Law, Equality and Social Justice), and the International Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus University Rotterdam. Her research explores the role of constitutionally protected human rights to address (intersectional) structural inequalities of race, gender, class and age in post-1994 South Africa, with a specific focus on the right to social protection. Her academic interests lie in analysing the relationship between human rights, governance, the economy and society, and her work has been published in the Oxford Journal of Human Rights Practice, the South African Journal on Human Rights and Development Southern Africa. During her research visit at SDU, she intends to develop her analysis of contemporary global debates surrounding the viability of a permanent and universal basic income grant (UBIG) as a human right in South Africa. More than an assessment of the affordability of a state-funded UBIG, her research interest is centred on how a UBIG may contribute toward the advancement of substantive equality for young black South African women who experience particular vulnerabilities as a result of the intersection of their race, gender, class and age.