Pulay Gergely Personalized Value Struggles amid Marketization: The Search for the Good among Men on the Margins of Bucharest című tanulmánya az East European Politics and Societies: and Cultures folyóiratban jelent meg.

Absztrakt

In the most notorious, mixed Roma and non-Roma Romanian neighbourhood of Bucharest, structurally accumulated problems of governance turn into practical challenges that need to be tackled with the means at each person’s disposal. Under conditions of capitalist incorporation and prolonged crises on the post-socialist periphery, the main protagonists of this account—male members of an extended network of Spoitori Roma with diverse livelihoods—strive for relative independence not only from market forces but also from actors who may expose them to abuse. In this article, I reflect on personalized value struggles associated with marketization. Instead of accepting the sectorial divisions between formality and informality, I show how marketization elucidates moral evaluations of being and doing good among men who hope to be or become “their own bosses” in precarious urban conditions. Distinguishing folk and analytic concepts, my analysis engages with the moral contestation of the “good” and the ambiguity of value-based human endeavours among different layers of contemporary economic life.

Zakariás Ildikó, Feischmidt Margit, Gerő Márton, Morauszki András, Zentai Violetta és Zsigmond Csilla Solidarity with Displaced People from Ukraine in Hungary: Attitudes and Practices című tanulmánya a Journal of International Migration and Integration folyóiratban jelent meg.

Absztrakt

The paper explores the attitudes of Hungarian civil society in the context of the war against Ukraine, the active agents of solidarity, and the general social atmosphere associated with welcoming displaced people. Based on a population survey from the summer of 2022, the paper draws an ambivalent picture. First, it highlights the exceptional momentum and mobilising power of civil solidarity both in terms of practical involvement and expressed attitudes. At the same time, the results also reveal the limits and vulnerabilities of civil solidarity—namely, its exposure to populist political discourses which cherish or condemn moral economies of assistance according to vested interests, as well as its embeddedness in a neoliberal reliance on citizens’ individual resources (disposable time and material means), and the salient inequalities in sharing the burdens of humanitarian support. All this reflects that the consensus and relative evenness of solidarity attitudes at the time of our survey were unevenly translated into practical help, burdening those already heavily charged with care responsibilities. With this finding, we underline the importance of exploring solidarity as a complex relationship of attitudes and practices; also, we highlight the need to include the perspectives of care in inquiries of the population’s attitude towards immigrant groups and categories. Our results are drawn from the application of multi-dimensional logistic regression models based on data from a statistical survey involving 1000 respondents representative of Hungary’s adult population.

Csata Zsombor, Péti Márton, Betty Compton, Amy H. Liu és Sándor Zsolt The income effects of minority co-ethnic employment: the case of Hungarians in central and Eastern Europe című tanulmánya a Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies folyóiratban jelent meg.

Absztrakt 

What is the effect of minority co-ethnic employment on income? While the business organizations literature argues diversity allows for knowledge accumulation, optimal labour allocation, and efficient interactions, absent is any consideration of language – e.g. language competency or language ideology. We argue when co-ethnic minorities work together, this shared language allows for bounded trust to develop; it also ensures there are preference similarities – factors that can increase firm productivity and individual wages. Using survey data of minority Hungarians in three Central and Eastern European countries (Romania, Slovakia, and Serbia), we find (1) diversity has no positive effect on income; and in fact, (2) co-ethnic employment increases wages in Southern Slovakia and Vojvodina. Additionally, we confirm that co-ethnic employment is not happening simply because of demographics. Instead, with one exception, the proportion of Hungarians in the workplace is significantly higher than in the areas where these jobs are located – suggesting a strategic behaviour by minority Hungarians. The implication is not that we endorse homogeneous workplaces per se, but that we remain cognizant of how asymmetric linguistic competencies and the underlying linguistic ideologies can shape power hierarchies – thereby limiting the benefits of diversity.

Bányai Viktória és Horváth Rita “They Drew What Was in Them: The Past, the Present” Testimonial Drawings as Schoolwork in the Immediate Aftermath of the Holocaust című tanulmánya a Shoah: Intervention. Methods. Documentation (S:I.M.O.N.) folyóirat 2023. évi 2. számában jelent meg. 

Absztrakt

A source group consisting of twenty-six drawings that was created by thirteen- and four-teen-year-old survivors in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust is analysed in this article. The youngsters who drew the testimonial drawings as compulsory school assign-ments were pupils of the High School for Girls of the Neolog Jewish Community of Pest. Our aim is to demonstrate that these drawings are crucial historical sources that document both the Holocaust and its immediate aftermath. Until recently, these kinds of documents have been routinely viewed as merely marginal sources of historical information, mainly because they are visual in nature and were created by young teenagers. Certain factors, such as the school environment, age, gender, and the shared historical experiences of the chil-dren turn the drawings into a source group from which additional information can be gleaned by analysing the individual pieces in one another’s contexts. The analyses of the drawings show that the girls consciously took the role of the witness upon themselves. We also examine how the fact that these drawings were created by females influences the source group.

A teljes lapszám elérhető a folyóirat honlapján.

A tartalomból:

Kötődésviszonyok egy online vizsgálat tükrében
A Covid-járvány hatása: ahogyan a magyar kivándorlók látták
Miért is maradnak? Az angliai magyar munkavállalók siker megélései
Tóth Károly el nem küldött levele Dobos Lászlónak, 1986
Az Ellenpontok fogadtatása a romániai magyar elit körében
Utcanévhasználat az utódállamokban

Fedinec Csilla Attempts of self-determination by the Carpathian Rusyns in the 1860s című tanulmánya a Fórum Társadalomtudományi Szemle 2023. évi angol számában jelent meg.

In the 1860s, the Ruthenians also formulated their basic political demands, similar to the other nationalities in Hungary, although in a less visible way as far as “big politics” on international level is concerned. These political demands were much broader than the right to use the language granted in the Act XLIV of 1868 on National Equality. As such, they can be understood as characteristic manifestations of national self-determination. It is useful to organize these elements into a kind of catalog of problems, with the aim of assessing the legal norms that have been implemented on this basis, as opposed to earlier approaches that did not rely on such a comparison.

Fedinec Csilla és Csernicskó István Issues of language policy and language planning in Transcarpathia during the first Czechoslovak Republic című tanulmánya ukrán nyelven az ACTA ACADEMIAE BEREGSASIENSIS PHILOLOGICA 2023. évi 2. számában jelent meg.

Issues of language policy and language planning in Transcarpathia during the first Czechoslovak Republic The concepts of state language, official language, and minority language do not have a generally accepted definition in international law. In Central and Eastern Europe, the state language is usually the language of the majority of the population of a particular country, in which it also serves as the official language. In interwar Czechoslovakia, the 1920 Language Law allowed the use of the language of the Slavic population, which constituted the absolute majority in the territory of Transcarpathia, as the official language in administration, office work, culture and education, granting the region's Slavs a greater degree of political, cultural and linguistic autonomy than they had ever enjoyed. But this linguistic freedom also brought practical problems to the surface. First of all, during this period there were three standard versions of the language adopted as the official language of the region. This article analyses the attitudes of the state and local intellectuals towards these language variants.

A Szent-Adalbert Közép- és Kelet-Európa Kutatásokért Alapítvány beszélgetést szervez az ELTE BTK Történeti Intézet Szekfű Gyula Könyvtárában 2023. december 11-én  Fedinec Csilla, Körner Gábor, Pálfalvi Lajos és Halász Iván részvételével.

Intézetünk munkatársa, Szerbhorváth György 2023. november 29-30-án részt vesz a Kulture u zoni konflikata / Cultures in the conflict zone című újvidéki nemzetközi konferencián, ahol szerb nyelven ad elő Sećanje na stara loša vremena – „zadatak” pisaca pre, za i posle vremena zla (Emlékezés a régi rossz időkre – az írók „feladata“ a gonoszság ideje előtt, alatt és után) címmel.

Az Országházban 2023. november 22-én konferenciát tartottak a Holodomor emlékezete címmel az 1932-33-as ukrajnai nagy éhínség 90. évfordulója, valamint a magyar Országgyűlésnek a Holodomort népirtásként elismerő, az ukrán nép irányába szolidaritását kifejező határozata meghozatalának 20. évfordulója alkalmából. A konferencián Fedinec Csilla a Holodomor az ukrán történeti politikában címmel tartott előadást.