This article analyses how institutional investors in residential real estate advanced in a context they describe as challenging. The article examines which local constellations and path dependencies directed institutional investors to and away from specific segments of the housing market. We argue that the subordinate state's role in ensuring spatio-temporal fixes for global real estate and financial capital transformed over time under 'catching-up' pressures and narratives employed by supra-state and transnational actors. At the same time, there is a parallel 'catching-up' process of institutional investors striving to increase their presence in a market with limited room to penetrate, characterised by high homeownership rates and dominated by rather small private actors ('super-homeownership', as it has been called). We propose the concept of reciprocal 'catching-up' to reveal the specific challenges posed by the context of semi-peripheral financialisation in Central and Eastern Europe to institutional investors. Reciprocal 'catching-up' highlights that actors linked to global financial flows had to deal with local historical arrangements and small local actors, who make the market and subsequently dominate it, until the market is ready to 'mature' and gradually open to them. Given the contradictory dynamics between the global-national-local scales in semi-peripheral financialisation of housing, different actors seem to be catching up to the others - depending on the scale chosen as a vantage point and the particular historical moment.

Problems that collective actors struggle with require collaborative and transformative knowledge production to be solved. Despite the long tradition of participatory approaches in social science research, issues concerning collaborative methodologies are often located at the bottom of the knowledge hierarchy. We want to place them at the centre of social movement research, but also direct attention to the processes through which collaborative knowledge is produced. We propose the metaphor of “kitchen-work” to focus on how “the cooking” of collaborative research with collective actors is done, how “recipes” for a more equitable society are created together. The metaphor illustrates methodological approaches where preparatory, relational, and often invisible work is done in research with collective actors. Using a classification of methodologies within, against, and beyond academia (inspired by David M. Bell and Kate Pahl), we distinguish recipes for research collaboration with collective actors and provide practical suggestions on cooking together collaboratively.

In this presentation I will problematise what it means to be at homewith feminism from the perspective of sex workers' rights activists inPoland. I will reflect on Nira Yuval-Davies' reflections on practices ofbelonging and othering within feminism and discuss what it means tobe at home with feminism in times of democratic backsliding in Polandin the years 2015-2023. Drawing on the experiences of sex workers'rights activists in participating in debates within feminist counter-publics. the emotions and affects that this entails, I will show howattempts to be at home with feminism can both generate positivefeelings of belonging as well as feelings of anger, disappointment or exhaustion.

In my presentation, I will discuss the ways in which various types of knowledge are translated in the process of providing services to sex workers in post-socialist Poland. The vocabulary of rights, community empowerment, decriminalization, and peer education has been an element of HIV programmes for sex workers globally. However, the process of translating these ideas into the work of service-providing NGOs in Poland in the early 2000s posed several challenges. In particular, the practices and ideas rooted in sex workers' rights mobilisations were difficult to translate in a context where the framing of 'sex work as work' was absent not only in harm reduction practice but also in the feminist or academic vocabulary. In addition, conservative values and the influence of the Catholic Church on social and health policies, such as restricting the use of condoms in prevention programmes, added another layer to this nexus. Drawing on my fieldwork with civil society actors involved in service provision and advocacy for sex workers, I will explore the outcomes of these processes and reconstruct how harm reduction and prevention programmes were translated into the Polish context.

This presentation discusses the transformation of sex work in the post-socialist context from the from the perspective of civil society initiatives. Problematising the temporality of post-socialism, I will explore the transformations of sex work and the different ways in which the neoliberal order and late modernity have affected both the vulnerabilities and strengths of workers through the lens of the struggle for sex workers' rights. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with sex worker support and advocacy groups support and advocacy groups and NGOs, this article explores how these actors have framed sex work. I will trace the transformations of framing of sex work across the economic and social changes that occurred as a result of the dismantling of state socialism and the introduction of the neoliberal economic order, as well as shifting geographical and political boundaries of Poland's position as a 'second world' country, a new EU member state and, more recently, democratic backsliding.

This presentation is based on three case studies of civil society actors, an anti-trafficking foundation, a harm reduction NGO and a sex workers' rights collective. I will introduce the concept of regimes of recognition to explore how these actors have framed sex work and how these frames correspond to historical processes of transformation and post-transformation. I will show how the specific timeframes created particular framings of sex work and how they constructed sex workers as particular subjects - victims, marginalised communities, perverts, workers or digital entrepreneurs.

The weak civil society thesis in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) has been central to scholarly debates interpreting civil society from a Western lens. Touching upon the issue of food sovereignty, we contest this conceptualisation by revealing the wider networks and strength of food-related local practices in Hungary after the 1990s. In doing so, we rely on a qualitative study conducted between 2020-2021, based on 25 semi-structured ‘oral herstory’ interviews with women who have been actively dealing with food sovereignty issues. With the above study, we had three main objectives. First, to counter the widespread (mis)perception of local food production as a mere necessity in CEE. Second, we highlight the importance of rural local food production, to counter the understanding of home gardening as a practice without resistance. Thirdly, we wish to voice the experiences of women in the movement in their larger structural and historical settings. Our findings concentrate on two key areas: the movement's experience with recurrent crises and political-economic conditions from the 1990s onwards, and the subjective assessment of shifting hierarchical dynamics within the movement milieu. The paper's main goal is to illuminate women's experiences and positionality within the global food system from a Hungarian viewpoint.