Mária Mokrá is a PhD student at the Institute of European Studies and International Relations at Comenius University with an educational background in European Studies and Sociology. Her dissertation project focuses on the memory of the post-socialist transformation through the narratives of nurses. For her bachelor thesis, she studied anti-gender discourse and its denouncing of (neo)liberal democracy, while in the master thesis, she engaged in cultural sociology examining the boundary work applied by the Slovak political representatives when constructing migrants as (un)grievable. At RECET she will be working on her PhD research project.

Research interests

• Care

• Security

• Socio-economic inequality

• Memory politics

• Biographical research

• Populism

• Neoliberalism

• Migration & Race

Current research project

Decentering Narratives of Post-Socialist Transformation: Memory of Nurses through Narratives of (In)Security

The research project aims to decentre the narrativization of the post-1989 transformation in Slovakia by examining the narratives of nurses and contextualize them with the dominant media narratives shaping the collective memory of transformation and health care. The project builds on a theoretical interdisciplinary framework connecting memory studies and security approaches. Such theoretical assemblage enables to identify the narratives of (in)security through which transformation can be grasped while adopting the critical approach advocating for radically pluralist memory and reflecting on the care system, and political and global socioeconomic power structures. The study will apply the narrative approach to analyze biographical interviews with nurses and selected media articles portraying the personal and collective memory of transformation.