Bernadett Sebály is a Doctoral Candidate at CEU’s Doctoral School of Political Science, with her dissertation defense scheduled for January 2026. She has also been a Research Affiliate at the CEU Democracy Institute since 2022. 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 international 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 focuses on the policy impact of social movements and organizing strategies to improve the effectiveness of social struggles. She is preparing for the defense of her doctoral thesis, which analyzes the combination of two factors: (1) in what ways social movement organizations relate to political parties, and (2) in what ways they bolster the position of their constituencies within alliances. She examines this through comparing the movement strategies of large families, public housing tenants, Roma people, homeless people, and indebted homeowners in Hungarian housing struggles between 1987 and 2024 through the state socialist, neoliberal and illiberal phases.
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 as a media officer with Minority Rights Group International connecting Central and Eastern European media outlets to minority and indigenous organizations in the Global South, 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 and the Award for Advanced Doctoral Students for 2024/2025. 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 an MA degree in Public Policy from the Central European University (CEU), and MA degree in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Miskolc, and a BA degree in Communications from the Budapest Business School. She has published articles in European and U.S. journals on housing and disability struggles, and community organizing.