Bernadett Sebály is a Doctoral Candidate at CEU’s Doctoral School of Political Science, Public Policy and International Relations in Vienna, as well as a Research Affiliate at the CEU Democracy Institute in Budapest. She built and manages The Story of Our Struggles 1989-2010 protest event database and resource bank. Bernadett is also the member of the editorial team of the Community Organizing Journal. In 2020-2021, she led two participatory action research processes, one with a Hungarian and one with an Eastern European focus. In 2022/2023, she was a Visiting Graduate Scholar at the SNF Agora at Johns Hopkins University. She is the co-editor of the book titled The Society of Power or the Power of Society? The Basics of Community Organizing (Budapest: Napvilág Kiadó, 2016).
Her research interest is the policy impact of social movements. Her doctoral work focuses on how different movement strategies to constituency and state power shape social movement organizations’ ability to assert values and policies. She examines this research question through comparing movement strategies in Hungarian housing struggles between 1987 and 2024. She elaborated a model of strategic orientations that can explain the different understandings of civil society in post-socialist Eastern Europe. Her research thus aims to contribute to the theory of civil society and help make social movements more effective.
Prior to CEU, Bernadett worked for 10 years at the grassroots, national and international levels to build strong civic organizations. She co-founded and organized in The City Is For All, a multi-class alliance of homeless people and people with housing insecurity and coordinated Civilizáció, a Hungarian network of CSOs during a period of repressive government measures. She worked with Amnesty International and Minority Rights Group International, and helped design and run a community organizing program in Hungary with the Civil College Foundation. She is on the board of the European Community Organizing Network.
Bernadett was the winner of CEU’s 1st-year PhD award for 2019/2020. Her The Story of Our Struggles project received the Engaged Research Award of the Talloires Network of Engaged Universities and the Open Society University Network (OSUN) in 2022. Bernadett has more than ten years of experience as an educator and also received training in pedagogy. In her teaching practice, she draws on the principles of critical pedagogy and uses co-operative teaching techniques. Bernadett holds a degree in Public Policy from the Central European University (CEU), Communications from the Budapest Business School, and Cultural Anthropology from the University of Miskolc. She has published articles in European and U.S. journals on housing and disability struggles, and community organizing.