News

Overlapping crises in Europe

Judit Durst and Gergő Pulay participated at the workshop of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) Europeanist Network held in Lisbon on 2-3 November. Their presentation was entitled: Crises and Moralities of Dependent Relations in Northern Hungary and Romania: Notes towards a Comparative Ethnography

Marketization and Interethnic Dynamics in Transylvania, Romania

Our colleague Zsombor Csata will give a lecture at the 21st Annual Meeting of the Hungarian Regional Science Association, organized on the occasion of the Day of Hungarian Science on 2nd November 2023 in Pécs, Hungary. His presentation is entitled: Interethnic relations in Transylvania in the context of marketization.

You can find more information about the conference here.

Adult Migrants’ Language Training in Austria

Ildikó Zakariás' and Nora Al-Awami's article Adult Migrants’ Language Training in Austria: The Role of Central and Eastern European Teachers was published in Social Inclusion issue Vol. 11, Issue 4.

Abstract

Language has gained increasing importance in immigration policies in Western European states, with a new model of citizenship, the ius linguarum (Fejes, 2019; Fortier, 2022), at its core. Accordingly, command of the (national) languages of host states operates both as a resource and as an ideological framework, legitimating the reproduction of inequalities among various migrant and non-migrant groups. In this article, we analyse the implications of such processes in the context of state-subsidised language teaching for refugees and migrants in Austria. Specifically, the article aims to explore labour migration, namely that of Central and Eastern European (CEE, including EU and non-EU citizen) professionals—mainly language teachers who enter the field of adult language teaching in Austria seeking a living and career prospects that they cannot find in the significantly underpaid educational sectors of CEE states. This article shows that the arrival of CEE professionals into these difficult and precarious jobs is enabled first by historical processes linking the CEE region to former political and economic power centres. Second, it is facilitated by legal, administrative, and symbolic processes that construct CEE citizens as second-order teachers in the field of migrant education in Austria. Our article, based on ethnographic fieldwork and qualitative interviews, highlights nuanced ways in which historically, economically, and politically embedded language geographies contribute to the reproduction of hierarchies of membership, inclusion, and exclusion in present-day immigration societies.

Hungarian minorities through the eyes of experts

A round table discussion on Hungarian minorities through the eyes of experts is organised by Egyház és Társadalom (the public, online journal of the EPMSZ and MPR) as part of the Lehet-e? [Can it be?] Forum  with the participation of János Fiala-Butora (HUN-REN Centre for Social Sciences Institute for Legal Studies), Tamás Kiss (Romanian Institute for Research on National Minorities) and Nándor Bárdi (HUN-REN Centre for Social Sciences Institute for Minority Studies).

Location: Háló Community and Cultural Centre (Budapest V. Semmelweis u. 4.)

Date: 31 October 2023 from 17.00

The Ukrainian Civil Volunteer Movement during Wartime (2014–2022)

The chapter by Csilla Fedinec was published in the open access volume by CEU Press titled Ukraine's Patronal Democracy and the Russian Invasion (The Russia-Ukraine War, Volume One) edited by Bálint Madlovics and Bálint Magyar

Abstract

The Russia–Ukraine War has been going on since February 2014, starting after Ukraine’s Revolution of Dignity (i.e., Euromaidan) in the winter of 2013–2014. The latter event also marks the birth of a new civil volunteer movement in Ukraine. In the chapter four phases of the development of this movement will be discussed. After a brief description of the “state domination” phase (1992–2013) and the definitions of civil activism in the Ukrainian legal context, the second phase of “political activation” follows with the Revolution (2014). The third phase starts in February–March 2014, with the annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation, and also involves the subsequent war in the Luhansk and Donetsk regions of Ukraine, collectively named Donbas (other terms used by the Ukrainian government, foreign institutions, and media publicity include, from April 2014, the “Anti-Terrorist Operation – ATO zone”, and from February 2018, the “Joint Forces Operation – JFO zone”). This period already marks the entry into total defense, with the state “catching up” and to a large degree substituted by the activities of the civil volunteer movement. While the birth of the movement during Euromaidan meant social mobilization after the previous large degree of immobility, this phase of total defense involved elements of both mobilization and co-optation by the state and oligarchic actors. The final phase started on February, 24, 2022 with the full-scale Russian invasion. In this period, we can see an active volunteer movement alongside formal state mobilization, with the state and society co-operating in their heroic effort to counter Russian aggression.