Research Staff
Chloë Delcour Els De Waele Rosalie FörsterRobbe GeysmansJozefien Godemont Lesley Hustinx Kaat LouckxManca PoglajenWerner SchirmerItamar ShacharFrederik Van der GuchtDirk Van GlabekeRaf VanderstraetenHendrik Wortmann
Chloë Delcour (junior researcher, teaching assistant, PS04)
Chloë Delcour obtained her Master in Sociology (2010-2011) at Ghent University . Now she works as a teaching assistant at the Sociology Department of this university. Her doctoral research is situated within the interdisciplinary domains of political and historical sociology. Her interests are oriented towards the topics of globalization, human rights culture, and international power relations. At the moment she is focusing on the capacity of global citizenship and is trying to pinpoint the main obstacles in theory and in practice.
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Els De Waele (junior researcher, PS04)
In 2012 Els De Waele obtained her Master degree in social work at the Department of Social Welfare Studies of Ghent University. Currently she is working as a Ph.D. candidate at the Center for Social Theory. Her doctoral research focuses on the triangular relationship between activation practices, the labor market and volunteer work, and on the emerging phenomenon of government-driven volunteering therein. More specifically she is studying how and with which consequences government-driven volunteering is employed as an answer to social exclusion, and which consequences this has for the present day nature of volunteering.
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Rosalie Förster (junior researcher, PS04)
Rosalie Förster is assistant at the Sociology Department of Ghent University and doctoral researcher affiliated to the Center for Social Theory.
For her PhD she is dealing with the “Micro-Macro link”, investigating tensions between interactions on the micro-level and structures on the meso- and macro-level, using the method of Conversation Analysis, enriched and “updated” with insights from network analysis and systems theory.
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Robbe Geysmans
My research interests are new forms of participation and citizenship, with a special emphasis on consumer activism and ethical consumption. I’m focusing on a variety of questions, such as ‘what is ethical consumption?’, ‘how is the buying/consuming of goods perceived as a form of civic participation?’ and ‘what’s the role of ethical products in an everyday supermarket?’.
My research interests are new forms of participation and citizenship, with a special emphasis on consumer activism and ethical consumption. I’m focusing on a variety of questions, such as ‘what is ethical consumption?’, ‘how is the buying/consuming of goods perceived as a form of civic participation?’ and ‘what’s the role of ethical products in an everyday supermarket?’.
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Jozefien Godemont (junior researcher, PS04)
Jozefien Godemont is preparing a joint doctorate at the universities of Ghent and Leuven.
The topic of her PhD is: Welfare architecture and solidarity: Impact of hybrid organization on citizen's voluntary engagement.
Previously she worked as a research assistant in the field of socio-economic health inequalities, women's and LGB movements, volunteering and self-help.
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Lesley Hustinx (lecturer, PS04)
Lesley Hustinx is a professor at the Center for Social Theory. She earned her Ph.D. in 2003 from the University of Leuven, and was granted a doctoral and postdoctoral fellowship of the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO). She was a visiting fellow at the Centre for Civil Society at London School of Economics, the School of Social Policy and Practice at the University of Pennsylvania, and the College of Letters, Arts and Sciences at the University of Southern California. Her major research interests include societies in transition, and the consequences of recent social change for the condition and nature of citizenship and citizen-based solidarity, focusing on the study of civil society and civic participation, voluntary associations and social capital, volunteering and philanthropy.
Lesley Hustinx is a board member of the International Society for Third Sector Research (ISTR) and the Flemish Sociological Association (VVS). She is an active member of the Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action (ARNOVA), the European Research Network on Philanthropy (ERNOP), and the European Civil Society Dissertation Network.
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Kaat Louckx (junior researcher, PS04)
Kaat Louckx (1983) studied medieval and modern history at Ghent University. She worked for one year as a researcher at the Free University of Brussels (VUB), where she was involved in an interuniversity project, HISSTAT, that aims to generate and develop a central database of historical statistics. She is currently a first-year Ph.D. student attached at the Center for Social Theory at Ghent University, where she is working on the reconstruction of social exclusion in 19th and 20th century state statistics. Currently, she is preparing an article on the concepts of exclusion and inclusion in the Belgian population censuses from 1846-1930.
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Manca Poglajen (visiting researcher)
Manca Poglajen is a researcher at the Institute for Innovation and Development of the University of Ljubljana, a PhD student at the Faculty of Social Sciences at University of Ljubljana (Slovenia), and a visiting researcher at the Center for Social Theory (Ghent University). Her interests lie in technology transfer, innovation management and the management of non-profit organizations.
Working on EU as well as national projects, she was able to combine her previous experience from media and development NGOs with the demands of collaborating in multinational teams. Currently, her work focuses on knowledge and technology transfer in Slovenia, with emphasis on the organizational and financial conditions for successful partnership of university and industry.
Werner Schirmer (senior researcher)
Werner Schirmer is postdoctoral visitor at the Center for Social Theory. He received his doctorate in sociology in 2008 (Title of the thesis: Bedrohungskommunikation [Threat communication]) at Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich (Germany). He worked as lecturer and researcher at Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich, University of Gävle (Sweden) and Uppsala University (Sweden), and he was visiting fellow at the Department of Peace and Conflict Research at Uppsala University (pre-doctoral) and at the department of sociology at the University of California Campus Irvine (postdoctoral).
His current research focuses on a sociological theory of respect (in cooperation with Wendelin Reich and Linda Hamann) and on the communicative construction of agency in the medico-political debates on healthcare prioritization in Sweden (in cooperation with Dimitris Michailakis).
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Itamar Shachar (Junior Reseacher)
Frederik Van der Gucht (junior researcher, PS04)
Frederik Van der Gucht holds a Master’s degree in Sociology. At the Center for Social Theory, he is currently preparing a Ph.D. dissertation provisionally entitled “Universities, Human Capital and the Knowledge Society”. He is mainly interested in the interaction between higher education and its societal environment, in the contribution of universities to the formation of the knowledge society. Using social-geographical and historical-sociological approaches, he focuses especially on shifting geographical differences with regard to educational and economic factors within Belgium and its regions.
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Dirk Van Glabeke
Dirk Van Glabeke is currently preparing his PhD dissertation at the Center for Social Theory.
The dissertation will be on the subject of the sociology of emotions, with as specific topic: rational decision making and the moral emotions, shame, guilt and pride.
Besides these subjects his main interests lie in the fields of social and moral norms, self, honor/respect, actor theories, social movements, the micro-macro link and historical sociology.
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Raf Vanderstraeten (professor, PS04)
Raf Vanderstraeten is University Professor and Professor of Sociology. His work is in the field of sociological theory, sociology of knowledge, sociology of religion, and sociology of education. Currently he is preparing a book on differentiation theory.
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Hendrik Wortmann (senior researcher, PS04)
Hendrik Wortmann is a Post Doctoral Fellow sponsored by the Swiss National Science Foundation. He completed a first degree in Sociology from Bielefeld University. His first appointment was as a Research Assistant there, followed by the same appointments in Constance and Lucerne. He received an PhD in Sociology in Lucerne in 2009.
His current research interests lie principally in the interdisciplinary area of modern evolutionary theory as it relates to questions of classical social theory. He has recently finished a book on the state of research of Darwinistic reasoning in the Social Sciences.
http://www.uvk.de/buch.asp?ISBN=9783867642644
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