Karin Doolan is Associate Professor at the Department of Sociology, University of Zadar. She holds an MPhil and PhD degree in sociology of education from the University of Cambridge. Following her MPhil degree she completed a programme in Democracy and Public Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science and after completing her PhD was a Visiting Scholar at Columbia University’s Harriman Institute.

Her teaching activities are rooted in critical and engaged pedagogy, and she conducts research on the interface between social class inequalities, education and disaster events. She led an inter-disciplinary team of researchers who revitalised social class analysis in Croatia following a hiatus going back to the end of socialist times. Her most recent project work has explored the micro-politics of schools in disaster contexts and social resilience in the midst and aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. Over the years her interlocutors have come from diverse backgrounds, including people eating in soup kitchens, teachers in communities recovering from floods or earthquakes and activists for the public good. Such research has fostered valuable, multiple perspectives on the political, social and economic dynamics that frame people’s everyday lives.

Whenever possible she uses her research to contribute to advocacy alliances and policy interventions driven by a vision of a more just society. In education, she has contributed to such interventions as a member of the National Committee for the Advancement of the Social Dimension of Higher Education and member of the Network of Experts on the Social Dimension of Education and Training, an advisory network to the European Commission.

She is the head of the governing board of the Institute for Political Ecology, a member of the presidency of the Croatian Sociological Association and was a founding member of Group 22, a Zagreb-based think-tank dedicated to green and left progressive politics.