Profile of Alexandra Ana

About

I am a doctor in political science and sociology, from Scuola Normale Superiore, where I graduated cum laude, in 2019. My thesis on comparative feminist movements and NGO-ization is currently under publication with Palgrave. I am currently a Marie Sklodowska-Curie postdoctoral fellow at Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), working on resistance to anti-gender movements and politics, within a decolonial framework and from a comparative perspective. My project – CORESIST, addresses the role of coalitions in strengthening and/or weakening the resistance to anti-gender politics, but also the challenges and tensions that permeate coalition-making, paying particular attention to the role of affects and emotions. CORESIST addresses the way different actors involved in resistance, articulate the relationship between the various issues targeted by anti-gender politics (sexual and reproductive rights; LGBTQI rights; children’s rights; gender; laws and policies against hate speech and discrimination). In my project, I adopt a multi-level comparison (horizontal, vertical, transversal), based on most dissimilar cases – France and Romania. CORESIST combines classic ethnography, deployed through focus-groups, episodic narrative interviews and participant observation, with digital ethnography and visual iconography. In 2023 I also won a Fonds National de Recherche Scientifique (FNRS) postdoctoral scholarship with a project titled “Strange bedfellows and unholy alliances: the role of coalitions in conservative movements” based on a comparative study between the UK, France and Romania. Additionally, I participate in a collective research project that investigates the current state of anti-gender campaigns in Belgium, but also their entanglements at international and European level. The project is commissioned by the Institut pour l’égalité des femmes et des hommes – the Belgian federal institution that promotes and ensures the respect of equality between women and men in the Belgian society and coordinated by David Paternotte. Besides research, I was previously a Teaching Fellow at Sciences Po Paris – where I taught from 2018 to 2022, gender, visual, urban and general sociology. I was invited as a guest lecturer at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), Sciences Po Reims, Université Libre de Bruxelles and University of Bucharest. I was also a Visiting Fellow at Centre METICES – Migrations, Espaces, Travail, Institutions, Citoyenneté, Épistémologie, Santé at ULB and a research collaborator at Technische Universität Dresden. As a political sociologist, my research is manifestly interdisciplinary, comparative and multi-level in stance and intersectionally grounded.

Research Interests

Europe (Central and Eastern), Citizenship, Civil Society, Cleavages, Comparative Politics, Contentious Politics, Cyber Politics, Democracy, Democratisation, European Politics, European Union, Extremism, Gender, Globalisation, Governance, Human Rights, Institutions, Migration, Political Economy, Political Participation, Political Theory, Political Violence, Populism, Religion, Social Capital, Social Justice, Social Movements, Social Welfare, UN, Welfare State, Knowledge, Political Sociology, Analytic, Coalition, Critical Theory, Feminism, Identity, Immigration, International, Marxism, Methods, Post-Structuralism, Qualitative Comparative Analysis, Qualitative, Race, Social Media, Asylum, Austerity, Climate Change, Comparative Perspective, Decision Making, Lobbying, Mixed Methods, Mobilisation, Narratives, NGOs, Political Activism, Political Engagement, Political Ideology, Power, Protests, Southern Europe, State Power, Activism, Capitalism, LGBTQI, Refugee, Theoretical, Transitional justice