Lucie Trlifajová

Lucie Trlifajová is an anthropologist and analyst of social policies at the Institute of Sociology, Czech Academy of Sciences, and at the Centre for Social Issues – SPOT. In her research, Lucie focuses mainly on the issues of precarity, inequality, welfare or debts and their impact on citizenship hierarchies. She has published on these issues in Czech as well as in international academic journals. Lucie is a co-author of the Minimum decent wage calculation for the Czech Republic.   

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?