From the outside, that sounds like the structure of a very interesting job, and one in which you have influence. Of course, I understand that from within the system, and given the political agenda, it may feel very different. But listening to you, my first reaction was that this sounds like quite an important position.
Please interrupt me at any point if I start sounding as though I am talking to a psychologist or therapist. But yes, you have hit the point exactly.
The reason I accepted the job was that it seemed to involve a leadership position. I thought I would be coordinating a team of around five people, actually more, potentially, because it was supposed to expand. But it did not turn out that way.
The first thing I realised was that you cannot really pretend it is not political. It is too close to politics. For a while it still seemed tolerable, with only small exceptions, even after the pandemic. It did not involve that much work from me most of the time. Like my other job, it often meant perhaps four hours a day, so I was not regularly working the full combined hours of both jobs.
But then there were peak moments when I had to work sixteen hours a day, and that still happens now. The bigger problem was that the political landscape changed a lot. I think the turning point was what we usually call the super-election year, 2024, when the RMDSZ shifted its strategy. It became more populist, more radical, and much more aligned with the Fidesz agenda in Hungary.
That was when situations started emerging in which I found it very difficult to identify with what was going on. So I had to reinterpret the job for myself. I told myself: look, I do it for the money. I am an expert. I am not selling my political loyalty, only my expertise.
But once you start thinking like that, commitment problems gradually appear. First, I began to question whether there was any need to keep building the organisation further. I did not want more people to be hired. I did not want it to become bigger, because it already felt too big for me. Then I cut back on my own initiative. I would do the work they assigned me, but I would stop coming up with new initiatives or research ideas to fill the remaining time. I simply stopped caring. If they were doing nothing, they were doing nothing. It was not my money, not my problem.
Of course, the real problem is that in the end it is Fidesz money. It comes from Hungary. It is completely legal, that is not the issue. Legally, there is no problem at all.
It is ideological, then? A matter of values.
Exactly. So at the moment my strategy is simply to wait until the elections. Maybe the elections will solve the problem for me. Maybe the whole thing will end quietly, without putting me in a position where I have to enter into an open conflict, resign, or leave dramatically.
That is my strategy for now. It is not a very admirable one. It is a bit like an ostrich putting its head in the sand and waiting for the storm to pass.
That is one side of it. But I have also realised that I am probably not really a leader type. Quite apart from all the politics I have been describing, I think that is also true.
So it feels as though this is a chapter in my life that will probably end soon. The bigger question is whether only this chapter will end, or whether my whole career as a social scientist or political scientist may come to an end as well. Perhaps I will reinvent myself in another niche of the social sciences. Or perhaps I will leave the social sciences entirely.
For a while, I started thinking seriously about that second possibility, because I also have a BA in psychology. I began considering whether I might return to that field. I completed the degree, but I never actually worked in that area afterwards. So it would really mean reinventing myself at forty-four.
There is still time, of course there is. It takes a lot of courage, but yes. And this is just my personal opinion, but I think it would be a pity if you were to leave your expertise behind entirely. I like the idea of reinvention, or of finding another niche.
At the same time, many people are in similar situations. I do not mean that to minimise what you are going through, only to say that academia in general, and globally, has become very precarious. Some places are more affected than others, but overall it is deeply precarious.
That means many of us have to find other niches and have the courage to move into them. For example, I also work about 80 percent at a university of medicine, on occupational health, as a qualitative researcher. I ended up there partly because, as an anthropologist, it is so difficult to find your place. Public health, by contrast, has resources.
And even there I also reached a point where I felt I could not stay indefinitely, because I did not like the way they privileged quantitative analysis over qualitative work, or the way they defined health, and so on. So yes, I find the idea of reinvention very compelling. And psychology also seems like a field that remains deeply needed. People really do need psychological insight and care.
Yes. My thought was that at least it might not be made completely useless by AI. That is my hope, at least.
What kinds of political or civic actions have you taken in your life that were not about voting? And are you also part of the Equality Transylvanian Movement?
I would not say I am really part of it. Let’s say I am a sympathiser, in the outer circle of the movement.
To come back to the first part of your question: what have I actually done? I signed some petitions and went to some demonstrations. Probably the thing I was most involved in was when the Hungarian government started pushing my university, CEU, out of Hungary. That was in 2017, I think. We protested quite systematically. We organised a few protests here in Cluj and took part in them. I was also sharing things on Facebook like crazy, press reports, interviews, all of it.
We, and I say “we” because I was doing this together with a bunch of people, mostly colleagues, many of whom are connected to this movement, were also involved in another action related to the restructuring of the research network of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. We made videos, posted them, and protested against that restructuring.
So I would say most of my involvement was limited to the academic sphere, or to issues connected to academia. I did not organise protests around Roma issues or around other precarious groups, for example. That does not mean I do not care. Perhaps I acted very indirectly, through research and publishing, but I think I only wrote one or two things about Roma issues. I am not really an activist type. That is the point I want to make. I got involved, but more at the margins.
But now there is this movement.
Please go on.
In this case, even just showing up at one of their events where I was invited as a speaker, came to be interpreted as a political act, and after all it probably was one. That was the most recent political act I took part in: a round table about voting in the Hungarian elections.
I felt that it was important to them that I be there, support them, and speak. They were very grateful for that. And I felt that this, now, was a political act, even though I tried to speak as an academic, analytically, about the issue.
This is where we have ended up. The political field has transformed in such a way that simply saying something in an academic language can itself become political. Of course the setting mattered too. At the same time, the movement itself made very clear that it does not want to become a political party. What it wants is to raise awareness, put issues on the agenda, and force other actors to react.
So it is political, but not in the classical sense of party politics.
And I do not want to get more involved than that. I will always help them, because some of them are among my closest colleagues and friends. But I do not want to become more involved because I am simply not an activist.
This is where a very interesting difference in personality comes in. Tamas and Bata say that one must not be apolitical, because that leads nowhere. If there is a problem, and you do not like how things are, then you have to be political, take action, be active, be loud, and maybe in that way you can achieve something, not necessarily a spectacular change, but at least something.
Whereas I increasingly feel that, after all, I may simply be an apolitical character. I do not mean that in an idealised way, like the old Central European dissident notion of apolitical morality. I just mean: I do not want to do it anymore. I want to stay away from it. I have had enough. I hate politics. I am saturated. I am burnt out. I do not want to do it anymore.
Of course, some people might simply say that I am a coward.
From an ethnographic and anthropological perspective, that is actually very interesting: how do we define who is a political activist, what counts as activism, what is politically motivated, and where the boundaries lie?
For my own PhD, I worked on women’s rights and activism in Lebanon, and I was constantly haunted by the question of how to differentiate between formal organisations, NGOs, activism, and more informal forms. I also realised that my own positionality mattered and that one can in fact do both. Activists in the field told me that directly.
So I find your case very interesting. I actually think you are very political. Your presence itself is political.
Yes, it is. And that is exactly what I am trying to flee from, or escape.
I do not know whether this is for good, or only a temporary shift. Maybe I just feel overwhelmed by the current political situation. But it is also the case that I am basically in the middle of my career, and if I am going to start a new one, I have to do it now. I cannot wait any longer.
And doing it now would also mean trying to leave all this behind. Not entirely, I will probably keep the same rituals, waking up and checking what is going on, not only in my country but elsewhere as well. But maybe I would do it a little less, read fewer news reports, fewer analyses, and try to leave it there.
At the same time, I do not want to cut myself off completely from the people I mentioned, and whom you also mentioned. So I really do not know how this will play out.
Were there moments when you felt excluded from political or public processes? And, on the contrary, moments when you felt very politically included?
I would not say that I felt excluded, because I did not really want to be included. What I have felt, and already mentioned to you, is the growing sense that what I do, or what I did, does not really make a difference. That has more to do with the changing logic of the political field, and also with the increasing precariousness of the academic sphere, as you described.
I was actually shocked when Gracy told me what she receives for her lectures, being paid on an honorary basis. It was just beyond belief.
Yes, that is ridiculous, and that was one of the reasons I also left the university. I was in a similar situation. I had been teaching seminars for five years, and then Covid came. It was unclear whether the courses would be online or offline. I went to the head of department and told him: you are paying so little for this that it simply makes no sense to continue. I asked whether there was any chance of a tenured position opening up that I might apply for. He told me that they were hoping for such a position, but there was someone else who was more urgent to hire.
Then I told him: if we go online, the whole syllabus will have to be reworked seriously, and I am not willing to do that for the money you are paying. And if we stay offline, I simply do not have the courage to walk into a classroom, because this was still the period before vaccines. So I said: I am sorry, but I am out. That is how it ended.
So what Gracy is doing now only really makes sense if she still has hope of somehow staying in the system.
Yes, and also simply for the CV, to be able to say that she taught courses. I know that sounds a bit harsh, as though I am reducing it to career logic, but I think that is part of it. Otherwise it is completely out of balance: all that preparation, all that expertise, for almost nothing. I was really shocked.
No, it is completely ridiculous. It is not like that all over the country, but some universities are infamous for this. What they are practising there is a form of extreme exploitation of academic labour. I did not want to tell Gracy that too bluntly because I did not want to discourage her.
But the broader problem is that the entire academic field is getting narrower and narrower. The chances of getting a tenured job are decreasing everywhere. Of course I see this most clearly at my university, but really it is the same everywhere: cuts, restructuring, cost-saving, all of it. Just as at the political level in Romania more generally.
So I do not see very bright prospects. Still, it is good that she got this position at the other university. It seems to be a more sympathetic institution, at least from what I know of the people there. So hopefully she can stay there.
We already touched on Covid and other turning points. Did the Covid-19 pandemic change how you think about what counts as political, or how you participate?
Perhaps this is an example of how broadly I understand the political, but yes, I think it did.
The main conclusion I drew from the aftermath of the pandemic — not necessarily from the pandemic itself, but from how it ended — was a very disappointing one. I saw it as a defeat of rationality, a defeat of the Enlightenment mindset.
My mother is a physician, an epidemiologist. I grew up with vaccines almost in my DNA, symbolically speaking, long before mRNA. For me, that was a basic truth: if you do not want to get sick, you get vaccinated.
Then I saw what happened during the pandemic. My older son was in kindergarten at the time, and we were very alert when we realised that some of the parents were anti-vaxxers. I remember thinking: who are these people? There were no vaccines available yet for the children, because they were too young, but at least the parents could get vaccinated. And when the vaccines finally became available, these people still did not want them. I simply could not understand how anyone could be so irrational.
At the end of it all, the conclusion I reached was that the side trying to defend a scientifically grounded and responsible position had basically lost. Through the internet and social media, conspiracy theorists, manipulators, and political actors were simply able to convince more people.
We even did a study about this, first a survey, and then an article. This was another moment when I stepped outside the ethnic-politics bubble. And the conclusions were deeply disappointing. It shook my belief that this work is worth doing, because you cannot really fight conspiracy theorists just by doing social research. Of course, in theory you can, but it shook me badly.