Julia Szalai, senior research fellow at CEU's Center for Policy Studies and visiting professor in the Department of Political Science and National Studies Program, has been awarded a research fellowship at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York for academic year 2016-17. Szalai will conduct research in the Advanced Research Collaborative (ARC) of the Graduate Center's 'Inequalities' research priority. Her research will aim to explore those dynamics of post-communist social transformation that lead to the social exclusion of Roma on ethnic grounds. By framing the process of exclusion in the power relations of inter-ethnic encounters in ethnically mixed communities, the research will look at the conflicting interests in accessing provisions of the newly arising welfare state. At the same time, the play of interests also will be viewed as part of the struggles for deserving social positions that claim Roma exclusion as a constituent of a distinct, and refused, identity and also as a rightful way of demonstrating justice in welfare distribution.
