Guests 2026

Zuzana Talašová is a PhD candidate in sociology at Masaryk University, Czech Republic, and a visiting research fellow at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Vienna. Her research focuses on intergenerational relations in contemporary four-generation families, with particular attention to the role of great-grandparenthood.

Her doctoral project examines the role of great-grandparents in contemporary four-generation families, focusing on how family roles and intergenerational relationships are constructed, negotiated, and maintained in everyday family life. The research explores how great-grandparenthood is experienced and narrated within families and how these narratives relate to practices of care, responsibility, and belonging.

Methodologically, the project is based on qualitative family interviews and visual timeline methods, which enable an analysis of intergenerational dynamics over time. By combining narrative perspectives with family-based qualitative research, the project contributes to sociological and anthropological debates on family, ageing, and intergenerational relations, highlighting great-grandparenthood as a distinctive late-life family role.

Sara Canha is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at the Centre for Research in Anthropology (CRIA), Iscte – University Institute of Lisbon, Portugal. In the summer semester of 2026, she is a Visiting PhD student at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Vienna.

Her doctoral project examines how paid and unpaid forms of home care in old age reproduce, negotiate, or challenge the meanings and boundaries that structure distinctions between family, professional, institutional and informal care arrangements. Framing this research within the context of the so-called ‘care crisis’ and ageing in place policies in the European context, she investigates tensions and ambivalences between public and private, formal and informal, work and non-work.

Through a multi-sited ethnography in the Lisbon district (2024–2025), involving private companies, social care institutions, formal and informal paid care workers, as well as informal and organised groups of care workers, the project focuses on two main dimensions: 1) the moral logics and value systems shaping how care work is organised, regulated, and managed; and 2) how people involved in home care experience, (re)signify, or negotiate care as practice, relationship, and ethics. The theoretical proposal is based on an integrated, multi-scalar, and ‘in relation’ approach, which particularly draws on the perspectives of feminist political economy and the anthropology of care.