Centre for Social Sciences Institute for Minority Studies

Judit Durst will give a lecture on "The moral economy of "flexploitation": informal migration intermediaries and their role in transnational labour migration of the rural Hungarian working poor" at the 16th International Society for Ethnology and Folklore (SIEF) congress on Living Uncertainty, which will take place between 7-10 June in Brno. The panel on "Dependence and Livelihood in times of uncertainty" will also be organised by Judit Durst, Gergely Pulay and Stefánia Toma (National Institute for Minority Research, Cluj-Napoca). The full programme of the event is available HERE.

The new article by Eszter Neumann and Pawel Rudnicki is now published in Journal of Contemporary European Studies (IF 1.208) and is available at HERE.

Abstract. In the European political landscape characterized by the strengthening influence of Eurosceptic, radical-right, and populist parties, Hungary and Poland represent insightful cases for understanding how the populist radical right uses its power in government and acts in full capacity to design education policies. From a systematic comparison of the education policy trajectories taken by Hungarian and Polish populist radical-right governments, we identified three characteristic patterns of populist radical-right education policy-making in the two countries: commitment to a conservative-nationalist agenda through comprehensive, systemic interventions, the implementation of Christian identitarianism through conceptualising public education as Christian upbringing, and finally, the gradual extremisation of the education agenda combined with the growing influence of transnational conservative knowledge transfer centred on the ‘gender wars’. We find that the boundary between far-right nativist and nationalist positions and Christian-conservative standpoints has faded away, and the two governments, which identify as Christian conservative, have increasingly mainstreamed far-right agendas.

The new open access textbook edited by Marina Andeva, Balázs Dobos, Ljubica Djordjevic, Börries Kuzmany and Tove H. Malloy has been now published by Palgrave Macmillan and can be dowloaded at HERE.

This Open Access textbook is a result of the work of ENTAN - European Non-Territorial Autonomy Network. It provides students with a comprehensive analysis of the different aspects and issues around the concept of non-territorial autonomy (NTA). The themes of each chapter have been selected to ensure a multi- and interdisciplinary overview of an emerging research field and show both in theory and in practice the possibilities of NTA in addressing cultural, ethnic, religious and language differences in contemporary societies.

Balázs Dobos and Balázs Vizi will attend the 27th World Convention of the Association for the Study of Nationalities (ASN) to be held at Columbia University in New York between 18 and 20 May. The full programme of the convention is available at HERE.

The new article by Eszter Neumann is now published in the Encyclopedia of New Populism and Responses in the 21st Century (Springer, 2023) and is available at HERE.

Abstract. The entry explores how the populist radical right governs education in countries where these parties formed governments in the fourth wave of populism. In broader, systemic issues, populist radical right education policies tend to follow neo-conservative and nationalist approaches and attach the narrow set of ideas prioritized by populist discourse to these frameworks. The populist radical right relies on religion as a source of political legitimacy and resacralizes schooling with the aim of imposing “traditional values” and the “traditional family” model on education. More recently, the transnationalization of radical conservative knowledge transfer influentially forms radical populist education agendas globally.