( Post-Doctoral Researcher, November 2026 – present )

Iva Čápová is a sociologist and anthropologist and a postdoctoral research fellow at the Centre de Sciences Humaines (CSH). In France she is affiliated with the Maurice Halbwachs Centre (CMH, ENS-EHESS-INRAE-CNRS) and the Research Unit on Transitions, Organizations, Power, and Inequality (UTOPI, CNRS–UT2–IEP Toulouse).
She holds a Ph.D. in sociology and anthropology from the École normale supérieure (ENS), Paris. She obtained a Master’s degree in Sociology, Public and Social Policy from Charles University in Prague, and another Master’s degree in Social Sciences from the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), Paris. She also holds degrees in Hindi Language and Civilization from the Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales (INALCO), Paris.

Before joining CSH, she was a teaching assistant (ATER) at Sciences Po Toulouse and a postdoctoral researcher at the CNRS.
Her doctoral research focused on primary education in rural Bihar, with particular attention to first-generation school-goers entering the free and compulsory schooling system. Drawing on the perspectives of families and primary schools, she examined the social transformations brought about by mass education following the implementation of the Education for All programme and the Right to Education Act.
Building on this work, Iva’s ongoing research adopts a comparative perspective on educational systems from primary school to university, drawing on multi-sited and multi-case ethnographic methods to explore the dynamics of schooling and the socio-economic and educational inequalities that shape differential access to knowledge and aspirations. She also analyzes school discipline, the norms promoted by educational institutions, and the sanctions and transgressions associated with them.
In India, she has conducted ethnographic fieldwork since 2013 in Bihar and Jharkhand, and since 2024 in Delhi. In France, she has been conducting two research projects in Aubervilliers since 2022, one of which will lead to a documentary film.
She is currently transforming her GIS Asie award-winning dissertation into a monograph.