Thank you for taking the time to help us gather more insight into the field. Since you also have a very interesting biography and work, I think it could be very helpful and beneficial for our research.
Just a short information about the project: INTERFACED is a EU funded Horizon Europe project with multiple organizations and universities, including Babes Bolyai University and the Hungarian social science department. The coordinator is City, University of London. There are also partners from Italy, Spain, Denmark, Tunisia, the UK, and Edgeryders as the social network. We are doing digital ethnography, using that platform for events and interviews, gathering data and then also visualizing it.
The idea for our conversation is to keep it broad. You are, of course, free to leave or refuse any question. You are a social scientist, you know this. If you do not feel like speaking with me, you can terminate the interview.
I hope I will not. If something special happens, Russia attacks Romania and starts bombarding, then maybe I will refuse. But go ahead with the questions.
The interview is semi structured, it takes roughly 45 minutes to one hour, but it depends on your elaborations. Last week, a friend and colleague from {city name}, was my guinea pig. We had more than one hour of interview, which was wonderful. She was a wonderful interview partner.
Let us start. We have a kind of priming question, a “memory lane” question to warm up: what is your earliest memory of politics?
Oh, wow. That is a great question. I am 48 years old, and my political memories go back to the former regime, the state socialist regime. I remember me, my parents and my grandparents listening to the radio, Hungarian radio stations, about the dictatorship, the Ceausescu dictatorship in Romania. I was asking questions about the political situation of the country, and my grandparents and parents were responding.
I remember being very sorry that we were living in this shitty dictatorship as a child. I think this is my first political memory. I have never thought about it this way before, but this is what comes to my mind first.
So it was about Ceausescu and the regime. How did you feel about it?
Frustrated. I felt some anxiety, because it was also about the secret police, what the secret police does to people who oppose the regime, and that they were hunting those who tried to cross the “green line”, the green zone, the border to Hungary.
It was anxiety about what could happen to me or my family members if something unpleasant happened.
Besides voting, what else comes to your mind when you hear the word “politics”?
Non conventional political action. I am involved in a kind of socio political movement, and I practice a non conventional way of making politics. I try to redefine politics in a way that means more active participation than just voting once every four years, or four times if you count parliamentary, local, and presidential elections.
For me it means defining the political agenda, adding new topics to it, debating. Deliberation is also part of politics. As is creating a political community. But definitely, if I think about politics, I do not think of voting as the most important factor.
And what are the most important political issues or topics for you?
Equality, meaning distributive issues and distributive justice.
But also politics of recognition for different dominated groups in society, minorities, ethnic or racial minorities, immigrants, women, LGBTQ communities.
There is a duality, recognition of subordinated groups and distributive justice.
The environment and climate are also important topics when I think about politics.
Can you give examples from your own life? Are there things you think are political that other people might not see that way?
For sure. Austerity, for instance. We are living in a period of austerity and a new wave of neoliberal decomposition of the Romanian state. In this context, what is happening in the educational system is seen by many people as a natural process or something that “must” be done, not as a political decision. It is perceived as the only way to keep the balance of the state budget.
But I think this is purely a political issue, a policy decision, and that decision is profoundly political.
I am engaged in investigating inequalities and the effects of these austerity measures on the educational system, especially how they affect educational access for disadvantaged groups.
Somehow these political issues also become daily life or business for you, you are working on these topics, right?
I am working on these topics as a sociologist.
Research for me also means doing public policy. But because I do not think there are parties in the current Romanian political context that represent these issues, this also means political activism.
You already touched on this, but how would you describe your own involvement in politics over the course of your life?
I think I have had political consciousness since my childhood.
During my high school and university years, politics for me was mostly ethnic politics: involvement in the national movement of the Transylvanian Hungarian minority community.
Then it broadened, definitely. Now it is more general and open toward other subordinated groups and toward political economic issues, which were practically missing earlier in my life.
Back then it meant primarily minority rights advocacy and ethnic politics, politics of recognition of a minority community.
Now it is broader in the sense that I see subordination as multiple.
There is class subordination, and other groups are even more subordinated.
We can also talk about intersectionality. For instance, Hungarian speaking Roma are subordinated both as Hungarian speakers, non dominant, non core group members, and as Roma, which is an ethno-racial category. These intersect.
Another change is that earlier in my professional career I was convinced that as a social scientist I could do useful work by contributing to public policies in dialogue with political actors. Now I consider that this interaction is no longer really possible, because of populist politics. Politics has become more populist, and populist politics means political actors and parties try to define reality itself, not just what should be done.
If, as a social scientist, I have to argue with political actors about what reality looks like, then this is no longer a communication about policy goals. This led me toward non conventional forms of political activism.
That is relatively new, in the last four or five years I have been more inclined in this direction.
We can say that this has to do with how politicians or populist parties and voices create or influence reality, including media and digital platforms.
That is a nice follow up - I’d like to understand more about the political engagement over time. You said it has been about five years since you had this painful recognition that, as a social scientist, you can no longer really engage with politics through politicians.
Would you also say that digitalization, or the pandemic, played a role in this?
Covid-19 pandemics had an impact, for sure, but I think only indirectly.
I do not think digitalization is the root cause of populism or of politics becoming more populist.
But digitalization provides tools through which populist ways of creating a majority, of creating a political community, can be done more easily.
The essence of politics is not digitalization, but this logic of constructing the political community through exclusion and dichotomies.
Unfortunately, these dichotomies are not only against those at the top, but also against those at the bottom, which is more painful, the exclusion of subordinated groups.
Digitalization and online media are indirectly linked because political communication became faster. In the case of Covid, I think Covid was directly a cause of the rise of a far right populist party in Romania by exaggerating existing inequalities.
The way Covid was treated by the Romanian state exaggerated inequalities. Entrepreneurs got a lot of subsidies. Those formally employed in the public sector received their salaries without actually working. But in Romania, a huge part of the population is employed in the informal sector: informal agriculture, informal commerce, or working abroad in circular labour migration. Those engaged in this informal sector, or working abroad, received almost nothing.
That became the root cause of the rise of a now quite robust populist party, with a relative majority, not in Parliament yet, but according to opinion polls.
What kinds of political or civic actions have you taken in your life that were not about voting? Public actions like protests, but also quieter actions like conversations, helping neighbours, donating, being part of things?
A lot. For instance, during Covid there was a network helping elderly people in our neighbourhood who were more at risk by going out to buy things. We arranged things for them. That is a quite banal example, but it happens often that I am engaged in such activities.
We also organize protests and regular debates about issues we want to put on the political agenda. I write newspaper articles, not only scientific articles. In the last two or three years, I have written far more newspaper articles than scientific ones, because this is how the political agenda can be modified, not only through scientific articles.
Scientific articles are needed as a background, based on research results, but we have to communicate more explicitly with a larger public, not only with the scientific community. I think this is also a political action, definitely.