Desalegn Birara Wondie

Desalegn Birara Wondie is a doctoral candidate in sociology. He has a background as a cultural heritage curator in Ethiopia where he published articles, op-eds, and analyses on the intersection of cultural heritage and ethnic politics. His latest article ‘Criminalization of traditional practices as a facet of cultural genocide: the case of enbedade amongst the Amhara community in Ethiopia’ was published on African identities. He obtained his BA and MA in Sociology from Addis Ababa University. His current research focuses on the 'Transformation of the Knowledge Society in the Digital Age’. 

Camila Contreras Vera

Camila Contreras Vera is a doctoral candidate in sociology. She is jointly affiliated with the Centre for Social Theory at Ghent University and the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile (PUC). She holds a BA in Political Science from PUC and an MSc in Governance and Development from the University of Antwerp, Belgium. Her research explores migrant integration in host societies, with a particular focus on the role of religious institutions in fostering social cohesion in Chile. Her broader academic interests include local governance, migration policies, and the sociology of religion.

Laura Goditiabois

Laura Goditiabois is a doctoral candidate and teaching assistant. She obtained an MSc in criminology and in sociology. Her research interests mainly focus on human-animal relations, animal welfare, and animal rights. She was the recipient of the Marthe Versichelen award for her master’s thesis research, which examined discourses on animals in court cases involving slaughterhouses. 

Tom Haseloff

Tom Haseloff is a PhD student in Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, and a PhD exchange student in Sociology at Ghent University. His research covers a range of topics in economic sociology and political economy, such as climate change, finance, and digital technology. His M.A. research examined the political and economic forces driving differences in the content of renewable energy policies among U.S. states. Currently, his research focuses on the role of finance, specifically venture capital, in the technology sector. 

Lesley Hustinx

Lesley Hustinx is associate professor of Sociology. Her fields of interest include social theory, political sociology, citizenship studies and third sector research. Her work has been published in, among others, Voluntas, Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Citizenship Studies, and European Sociological Review. She serves on the editorial board of Voluntas and Journal of Civil Society. She formerly was a board member of the International Society for Third Sector Research, and an expert member of the High Council for Volunteering in Belgium.

Julija Kekstaite

Julija Kekstaite is a doctoral researcher in Sociology at Ghent University. Her research interests include sociological examination of forced migration, civic engagement, immigration policies and feminist theory. Her current project investigates civic engagement with illegalised migrants at the Lithuania-Belarus borderland and racialised migration governance in Lithuania.

Yasmien Khaled

Yasmien Khaled is a doctoral candidate and teaching assistant. Her research focuses on youth in the Middle East and their patterns of civic engagement, specifically through their volunteering activities. She seeks to investigate how the civic engagement of young Arab civilians is molded by cultural practices, third sector organizations, and state ideologies.

Massilia Ourabah

Massilia Ourabah is a FWO doctoral research fellow. She is doing research on how reproductive labour, the labour that reproduces and maintains life, reconfigures in the new climatic regime. Her work mobilises (feminist) science and technology studies, ecological thought, social reproduction theory, ethics of care, and Rancièrian theories of radical equality. In 2020 she published The Social Life of a Herstory Textbook (Palgrave Macmillan).

Laura Stielike

Laura Stielike is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Migration Research and Intercultural Studies at Osnabrück University and affiliated with the Centre for Social Theory at Ghent University. In her current work, she explores the digital transformation of migration-related knowledge production. For her PhD at Freie Universität Berlin, she investigated the ‘migration&development dispositif’ with a focus on Cameroonian migration to Germany. Her fields of interest include sociology of knowledge, STS, discourse analysis, intersectionality, postcolonial studies, digital migration studies and critical data studies.

Ewoud Vandepitte

Ewoud Vandepitte is a voluntary research fellow at the CST. He is in the process of finishing an FWO doctoral project in sociology at the university of Antwerp. His research explores how Belgian climate protestors cultivate hope and thereby draws from social movement theory, sociology of emotions and environmental sociology. He holds masters’ degrees in sociology and moral sciences from Ghent University. 

Toyah Van der Poten

Toyah Van der Poten is a doctoral candidate. She has a background as a filmmaker, with experience in both documentaries and socio-artistic projects. The doctoral research she is working on focuses on the underrepresentation and (re)presentation of ethnic groups in blood donation and challenges the organizational field of blood donation. The experiences of individuals with a migration background are studied through fieldwork in Ghent (BE) and Leicester (UK).

Raf Vanderstraeten

Raf Vanderstraeten is Professor of Sociology. His work is in the field of sociological theory, sociology of knowledge, sociology of religion, and sociology of education. In recent years, he has been Visiting Scholar in the Department of Sociology of the University of Chicago (USA) and Visiting Professor in the London School of Economics and Political Science (England). With Kaat Louckx, he published in 2018 Sociology in Belgium: A Sociological History (Palgrave Macmillan) and in 2022 Soziologie in Belgien (Springer). He is co-editing the forthcoming Elgar Encyclopedia of Global Social Theory.