Lucie Janotová is a PhD candidate in Political Science and Sociology at Scuola Normale Superiore in Florence, and a member of the Center on Social Movement Studies (COSMOS). She holds an MA in Political Science from Central European University in Budapest and a BA in IRES from Masaryk University in Brno. Her research lies in the fields of social movements’ and cultural studies, with a specific focus on artistic and cultural activism, and protest visual analysis. In her PhD project, she investigates artistic contentious performances in dictatorial regimes, particularly in the region of the former Eastern Bloc.

She approaches this topic as a researcher, activist and an artist by combining academic research with practice-based, curatorial and filmmaking practices. When not at the university, she tours the documentary film Szabad Egyetem/ The Free University about the exile of the Central European university from Hungary and the student movement that tried to resist, which she co-directed.

Research interests: social movements, artistic activism, subaltern movements, public sphere and counterpublics, qualitative methods, practice-based participatory research, visual analysis, and filmmaking