Kateřina Smejkalová

Kateřina Smejkalová studied political science at Ruhr-Universität Bochum (Germany). She works as policy advisor and project manager at the Prague office of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung think-tank. She is mainly responsible for the topics of labour and social affairs. It is in this role that she is active in the project of Minimum Decent Wage, which will be at the centre of the workshop. Above that, she is also a publicist for several Czech and but also foreign media outlets.  

Workshop | From poverty to dignity: where to look for answers to the experience of economic insecurity  

The Czech economy is built on low wages. And yet, low incomes, low savings or fears about the future have long been perceived not only as an individual responsibility (Work more! Save!), stigmatized and not made visible. It's as if the problem of poverty doesn't exist in the Czech Republic, no one wants to be labelled poor. And yet economic insecurity affects many people. What happens when a society has long lacked a language to capture the experience of a large part of it? What kind of feelings, reactions, and defense mechanisms does this provoke? And how can we work with it?