On May 22 Nóra Kovács gave a presentation entitled "Authenticity, Ethnicity, Ownership? The Peculiar Dynamics of Translocal Social Dance Communities of ICH in a Globalised World and the Example of Tango Argentino" at the conference HOW SUSTAINABLE IS DANCE AS INTANGIBLE CULTURAL HERITAGE? in Ljubljana.
Our colleague Csilla Fedinec has spoken several times in recent days about Ukraine, the country's accession to the European Union and Hungarian-Ukrainian relations:
"Building a Good Neighbourhood in Central Europe for Ukraine's Successful Accession to the EU" (workshop organised by the Institute for Central European Strategy in Uzhhorod)
"Hungarians cannot be treated as a homogeneous mass" (Ukrainian newspaper New Voice on Hungarian-Ukrainian diplomatic relations)
"Ukraine's EU membership is a lifeline for Europe" (on the changing European security architecture for Ukrinform news agency)
Knowledge and power (on Tilos Radio with Viktor Olivér Lőrincz)
Current issues on Ukraine today (with János Dési on Klubrádió)
Gergely Pulay will take part in the international conference Voices and Silences: 50 years of the Society for Romanian Studies, to be held at the Babeș-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca, on 29-31 May.
His presentation will be entitled Everyday Livelihood and Popular Politics at the Margins of Bucharest.
In addition to his lecture, he will participate in a round table discussion on Călin Goina's book Parallel Lives: An Empirical Exploration of The Concept of Generation.
On June 3, 2025, at 17:00, the book by Tamás Sárándi: Függőben. A román kisebbség helyzete Észak-Erdélyben (1940-1944) [The situation of the Romanian minority in Northern Transylvania] will be presented at Írók Boltja (1061 Budapest, Andrássy út 45). Nándor Bárdi, Réka Marchut, Pál Hatos, and Balázs Ablonczy will join the author for a discussion about the book.
In the course of MTA200 programme, Attila Papp Z., Director of our Institute, gave a lecture entitled Results of the PISA 2022 Competency Assessment with special focus on Ukraine at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences on 22 May 2025.
A new article by Balázs Dobos and his co-author Tamás Szabó has been published on the 2024 elections of minority self-governments in Hungary in the recent special issue of Comitatus on the latest municipal elections. The article is available at the journal's website.
Balázs Dobos and Balázs Vizi will attend the 29th World Congress of the Association for the Study of Nationalities (ASN) which will take place between 22 and 24 May at the Columbia University, New York.
The titles of their papers are:
Balázs Dobos: Talking about or to minorities? Understanding the role of minority spokespersons on Facebook in Hungary
Balázs Vizi: Minority Participation and Parliamentary Elections in Kosovo.
The full program of the congress is available at the convention website
An article by Nóra Kovács: Social and Moral Remittances of Diaspora in Homeland Politics: Two Cases from Hungary was published.
Kovács, Nóra: Social and Moral Remittances of Diaspora in Homeland Politics: Two Cases from Hungary. In: Vytis Ciubrinskas and Ninan Glick Schiller (eds) Transnationalities of Migrant Moral Economies in a Transforming World. Berghahn, 167-190.
The Institute for Minority Studies, as a partner of the consortium leader University of Timisoara, has been awarded a Staff Exchanges grant from the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship of the European Union for the research project Ecosystems for Higher Education Inclusion: connecting underserved communities with higher education through participatory engagement and research methodologies (EHEI).
The article by Margit Feischmidt, Ildikó Zakariás, Violetta Zentai, Csilla Zsigmond and Eszter Neumann: Constrained Localism in an Authoritarian Environment: Developments in Solidarity With Displaced Ukrainians in Hungary was published online first in the Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies. The article is open access. It is part of the research project Work, values, hope in spaces of solidarity. The possibilities and limits of transformative solidarity in Hungary
Abstract
The paper examines how collaborations and alliance-building among civic and municipal actors supporting displaced Ukrainians in Hungary contributed to the emergence of localism as an alternative approach to the central state’s hostile migration policy and curtailment of the rights of civic and municipal actors. The qualitative research, which forms the basis of this study, explored the solidarity acts of civic and municipal actors and considered how the Hungarian state and international humanitarian organizations contributed to localizing refugee-support responsibilities. Applying the notion of constrained localism, we seek to indicate how localism unfolds through alliances between civic and municipal solidarity actors, sometimes transforming longer-term refugee reception and diversity governance, while in other cases, remaining fragile, limited in scope, and contended.