Nastia Nedjai

Nastia Nedjai is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Inequality, Transformation and Conflict. Her research interests lie at the interface of political sociology and political economy, with a particular focus on the long-term transformation of labor markets, welfare states, and social conflicts. In her master’s thesis, she examined how changing welfare-state institutions and social policies shape the political participation of vulnerable labor-market groups.

She studied social sciences at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, where she successfully completed both her bachelor’s and master’s degrees, and spent a semester at the École Normale Supérieure d'Ulm in Paris. During her studies, she developed a strong enthusiasm for empirical social research. She conducted qualitative interviews, completed fieldwork trainings in cooperation with the United Nations in Geneva, taught quantitative methods and statistics, and later, working as part of a team, supervised telephone survey projects commissioned by IG Metall. These diverse early research experiences continue to inform her scholarly work to this day.

In addition, she gained professional experience as an editorial director in academic publishing and worked at several institutions at Humboldt-Universität, including the departments of macrosociology and labor and gender relations. She further contributed to research in the Consensus and Conflict Department at the German Center for Integration and Migration Research (DeZIM) and gained initial insights into political practice at the German Bundestag.

Building on these experiences, her doctoral research will further integrate political-economy perspectives with questions and challenges of political behavior and conflict in Western and Eastern European democracies.