Director

Iztok Šori

Dr. Iztok Šori is director and research assistant at the Peace Institute. His research work is placed at the intersections of gender, migrations and work, which he studies within various social fields (prostitution, politics, private life). In recent years, he has mainly studied (extreme right) populism, hate speech, multicultural media education, and care practices and the reconciliation of private and professional life by men. He completed his undergraduate studies in sociology and ethnology and cultural anthropology at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Ljubljana. His thesis entitled “Prostitution in Slovenia: an insight into the hidden population (actors, image, problems and relationships)” (2003) was awarded with the Prešeren Prize of the Faculty of Arts. In the same faculty, he completed his doctoral thesis in 2012 with a dissertation, which in Slovenia first discussed lifestyles of “singles”. The results of the extensive empirical research have been published in the scientific monograph “Being single: between the ideology of the family and the ideology of choice” (Aristei, 2015).

After graduation, he first worked as a freelance journalist and completed within a scholarship program of the Bosch Foundation an internship at the German newspaper TAZ – Die Tagezeitung in Berlin. In 2007, he became a researcher at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Ljubljana, where he focused on issues of violence against women, the political participation of women and the reconciliation of private and professional life. To this day, gender has remained a key area of his interests and actions. In 2011, he started to work for the Peace Institute and expanded the range of his research experiences to migrations, populism, prostitution and masculinities. He also collaborated with the Center for Social Informatics at the Faculty of Social Sciences of the University of Ljubljana, where he dealt with the field of hate speech. Between 2015 and 2017 he was a member of the Action COST IS1209 – “Comparison of European Politics of Prostitution: Understanding the Scales and Cultures of Management” (ProsPol), which in 2016 awarded him a scholarship for research on self-organization of sex work in the Netherlands.

An important part of his experiences includes pedagogical activities. In the academic year 2016/2017 he was an assistant for the subject Introduction to Sociology at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Ljubljana. In recent years, he had invited lectures on prostitution, trafficking in human beings, populism and lifestyle at the Faculty of Arts, Faculty of Social Sciences and the Faculty of Education. During the years 2009-2011, he conducted lectures on trafficking in human beings, prostitution and gender equality for employees in kindergartens, primary and secondary schools and boarding schools (the project was run by the Faculty of Education). He also conducted more than 50 workshops for pupils of elementary and secondary schools on hate speech and migrations.

Between 2011 – 2018 he was the President of the Association for the Promotion of Equality and Plurality Vita Activa, which is most active in the filed of gender equality; since 2014 she is a member of the editorial office of spol.si. He is also a member of the Slovenian Sociological Association and the Slovenian Sexological Association.