Lefteast
Text and photos by Szilárd Kalmár, translated by Arnold Velansits. First published in Mérce. In the spring of 2015, a wave of refugees reached Europe of a size that had not been seen before. The general public – including us – was not informed, or barely were, about this situation and only realized what we […]
ith the very recent founding of a “streamlined” Family Research Centre, compatible with the government’s political agenda, within the Academy’s Institute of Sociology, heteronomy in academe has reached a new peak. In a context where “family research” serves as a governmental counter-discourse par excellence to bash “gender studies” (generally associated with liberalism, multiculturalism, relativism and the CEU), the foundation of a “family research centre” within the Hungarian Academy of Sciences is not only ethically questionable; it is also a clear sign of governmental policies permeating the consecrated realms of science. The Centre’s official credo propagating “value-neutral” science on its homepage is anything but neutral, given that its creation is inseparable from an evidently over-politicised context. Therefore, “value-neutrality” should be better understood as a justificatory ideology for official sociology that aims “not to realise itself as a science but to realise an official image of science”.
Hungary’s new law “seems to be part of the broader war of the government on gender. Defining sex at birth as an unchangeable characteristic is part of that discourse and is an obvious attack on the right of trans and intersex people in Hungary. The situation for trans people was getting worse in the past years but we did not experienced targeted attacks before this law proposal.”
A lecture given by Paul Stubbs to the Open Learning Initiative of the Central European University on the 16th of May looking at the various ways through which social policy as a technical discipline ignores political economy. “The articulation of modes of governmentality that combine heteronormative familialism, repatriarchialization, nationalism, ethnicized demographic renewal and anti‐immigrant sentiments […]
This Sunday (3 May), the “Georg” documentary, on György Lukács – his life, work, archives and contemporary significance – can be watched free of charge. Embedded link and password are inside the post.
The racialization/inferiorization of Roma has been normalized over centuries and supported by social structures. Therefore, instead of organizing public protest against such statements, we rather tacitly accept and even mainstream these violent discourses. In this sense, the racialization of Roma is not a novelty. However, the way it is framed in illiberal political discourse excludes any other point of view, even if comes from the independent judiciary.
Gender scholars Eszter Kovats and Aniko Gregor assess the latest developments in politicians’ attitudes towards gender studies in Hungary and argue, intriguingly – we believe, for an Eastern European feminist agenda which prioritizes women’s access to social services before arguing for gender struggle within families. We republish here the interview conducted by Veronika Pehe, who […]
Many of the pieces in the latest Fordulat issue argue, climate change is the result of very specific and not at all inevitable historical developments closely tied to the unfolding of capitalism between the 16th and 18th centuries.
Because of the threatening attacks on the LAK and on academic freedom – and even on the MTA – we have to work on urging and supporting the research of Lukács without the traditional institutional background. Therefore, we would like to kindly ask the friends of LANA, those organisations and people – who besides expressing their solidarity, are intending to support our work financially – to contribute towards the expenses of LANA and to the realisation of our plans.
“…History, rather, is an alternative process in which socialism has a great chance because there are no other real alternatives to capitalism. This is the reason why Marx is so reviled in Eastern Europe. Nevertheless, in the absence of a socialist perspective, humankind might face total self-destruction. This is also a realistic alternative.”