Tomas Bata University in Zlín

Prof. RNDr. Jaroslava Pavelková, CSc.

This September issue of H-Journal offers readers a closer look at Prof. RNDr. Jaroslav Pavelková, CSc., who successfully passed the procedure for appointment as a professor based on her teaching and scientific qualifications in the past year 2023.

In March this year, she was inaugurated by the President of the Slovak Republic, Mrs. Zuzana Čaputová, from whom she received the official appointment decree in the field of Social Work.

She was born in Karlovy Vary and after high school she graduated from the Faculty of Science of Charles University in Prague, where she studied systematic biology, specializing in anthropology, including doctoral studies. After graduating from university, she became a professional worker at the Institute of Archaeology of the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague, and later head of the Department of Anthropology and Zoology. After the transformation of society in the 1990s, she left for academia. She habilitated at the University of Prešov, Faculty of Philosophy in the field of Social Work. Currently, she has been working for several years as an academic, lecturer and guarantor of the study programme Health and Social Care at the Institute of Health Sciences at the Faculty of Humanities at Tomas Bata University in Zlín, where she also held the position of Vice-Dean for Creative Activities and Doctoral Studies.

Her current academic research focuses on the issues of young mentally disadvantaged homeless people and seeks alternative ways to improve their lives.

She recognizes that homelessness is a worldwide problem precisely with the increasing number of young individuals who have found themselves on the streets for various reasons. It is a social category of people who are manifestly poor, living on the margins of society and characterised by a specific way of life that marginalises them on the basis of their inability to participate in the quality of life and their disregard for the demands of mainstream society. It is precisely the issues related to the phenomenon of homeless young people, using a subjective assessment of the situation that has arisen and understanding the reasons and causes of their social decline, which has led to their unfavourable social situation, that it is necessary to address through appropriately applied social work, to which it also leads its students.

Prof. J. Pavelková devotes her free time to the years of cooperation with the Institute of Archaeology of the Slovak Academy of Sciences in Nitra, for which she has prepared anthropological analyses of burnt human remains of the Southeastern Ashfields culture from many Slovak sites (Cinobaňa, Kyjatice, Mikušovce, Rajec, Varín, Velký Cetín, etc.), including paleo demographic conclusions. These are approximately 1000 anthropoid human remains, which she analysed, and the results were not only published in renowned scientific journals, but also presented at scientific conferences and universities in the European context.

Congratulations on your successful appointment as a professor.