Michal Vašečka, an Associate Professor at the Bratislava International School of Liberal Arts (BISLA) since 2015, has a background in sociology and focuses his research on various topics such as ethnicity, race, migration studies, populism, extremism, social movements, and civil society. He has an extensive academic career, having worked at the Faculty of Social Studies of Masaryk University in Brno from 2002 to 2017 and at the Faculty of Social and Economic Sciences of Comenius University in Bratislava from 2006 to 2009.
Throughout his career, Michal Vašečka has also held visiting scholar positions at esteemed institutions. He operated as a visiting scholar at the New School University in New York from 1996 to 1997, the University of London in 1998, Georgetown University in Washington DC from 2008 to 2009, the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in 2015, and served as an ISGAP Scholar-In-Residence at Oxford University in 2016. Currently, since 2020, he is a research fellow at ISGAP – Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy.
In 2006, Michal Vašečka founded the Center for the Research of Ethnicity and Culture (CVEK) and served as its director until 2012. From 1998 to 2005, he worked at the Slovak think-tank Institute of Public Affairs (IVO) as a program director, focusing on expert analysis of the Slovak transformation process with an emphasis on national minorities and the state of civil society in Slovakia. He has also worked as a consultant for the World Bank from 2000 to 2008 and in 2011-2012.
Michal Vašečka has been actively involved in promoting human rights and combating racism and extremism. He has served as a representative of the Slovak Republic in the European Commission Against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI), a human rights body of the Council of Europe, since 2012. From 2017 to 2020, he was the vice-chairman of the governmental committee VRAX, which addressed extremism and racism in Slovakia. Furthermore, he served as the chairman of the Board of the Fulbright Commission in Slovakia from 2010 to 2017. He is a member of the Advisory Board of the European Centre for Minority Issues in Flensburg since 2010 and has been the president of the Executive Board of the Platform for Improvement of Health Status of Disadvantaged Groups in Bratislava since 2017.
Dr. Michal Vašečka has taken up key positions in various editorial and advisory boards. Since 2016, he has been the chairman of the Editorial Board of Denník N, a major daily newspaper in Slovakia. He was a member of the Advisory Board of the Prague-based Aspen Review Central Europe from 2012 to 2016 and has been a member of the Editorial Board since 2016.
In recognition of his exceptional contributions to human rights, Michal Vašečka was honored with the Award for Special Contribution in the Field of Human Rights by the Minister of Justice of Slovakia in 2018.
