The dissertation interprets the vampire as a case of extraordinary knowledge production on the margins of the known world. I directed the focus at experts entrusted to apply their specialized knowledge on diagnosing the vampiric attack and on regulating the unruly dead. Throughout the first half of the eighteenth century, these expertsserved various social groups: local communities, administrative-judicial structures, aristocratic circles, the republic of letters and aulic political spheres. Thus, historical sources produced on vampires unveil actors, interests and intense negotiations about what is ‘normal’ death and decay, about who is an expert, and what is proof. I argue that knowledge production is social, political, and bears the mark of the environment where it was produced.
Kelemen, Ágnes Katalin: Peregrination in the age of the Numerus Clausus : Hungarian Jewish students in interwar Europe. Budapest : Central European University, 2019: http://www.etd.ceu.edu/2020/kelemen_agi.pdf
This dissertation investigates the dynamics between academic antisemitism, Jewish social mobility and Jewish migration through the case study of the “numerus clausus exiles” – as Jewish students who left interwar Hungary due to the antisemitic numerus clausus law (Law XXV of 1920) were called by contemporaries and historians. After a conceptual and historiographic introduction in the first chapter embedding this work in the contexts of Jewish studies, social history and exile studies; interwar Hungarian Jewish peregrination is examined from four different aspects in four chapters based on four different types of sources. In the second chapter an analysis of contemporary Hungarian (Jewish and non-Jewish) discourses is based on pro-Horthy, Conservative, Liberal, Social Democratic, assimilationist Jewish and Zionist press. It is argued that peregrination from Hungary was in the general press recognized as a mostly Jewish phenomenon, caused by the restriction of Jewish access to Hungarian universities, rather than a voluntary movement motivated by thirst for knowledge. In the meantime, the plight of émigré students became a central topic in Jewish press because a new Hungarian Jewish community of fate and identity was built on the support mechanism for numerus clausus exiles. Based on a database of over 1000 Hungarian medical and engineering students enrolled in universities abroad between 1920 and 1938 – Czechoslovakia, the First Austrian Republic, Weimar Germany and Fascist Italy – that the dissertation’s author constructed; the third chapter analyzes the social background of émigré students – most of whom were Jewish. In this way the case is made that studying abroad was a phenomenon of lower middleclass Jewish youth’s upward social mobility through education rather than an escape route reserved for privileged Jews. Ego documents written and edited (in most cases even published) by numerus clausus exiles provide the source base for the fourth chapter which reconstructs their own narratives on their peregrination. The prevalence of interpreting their student migration as exile from the Hungarian homeland unfolds both from autobiographies and memoirs written decades later and from letters sent while studying abroad, albeit with important individual variations. Based on digital databases, the fifth chapter follows up the career and life trajectories of students after their studies abroad. Four basic patterns are distinguished among the biographies of the over 1000 subjects: the most successful ones emigrated to the Western world usually through step-migration through Weimar Germany and did not return to Hungary. Few numerus clausus exiles immigrated to Palestine, however, they played important roles in the higher education and scholarship of Mandate Palestine and later of the State of Israel. Most numerus clausus exiles were forced to return to Hungary in the late 1930s due to the spread of hostility towards foreign Jews across Europe. They belong to two main groups, namely Shoah victims and Shoah survivors. The latter were likely to stay in Hungary for the rest of their lives after liberation, their experience with emigration notwithstanding, because they received opportunities for career advancement earlier denied to them and many believed this was also a chance to redeem Hungary from inequalities and injustices through Socialism. At the same time, quite a few numerus clausus exiles were put on show trials in the Stalinist period due to their past abroad and many more got disillusioned by the discrepancies between the ideal of Communism and the reality of State Socialism. Finally, it is argued in the final conclusions that this study speaks to the larger questions of how a minority can respond to discrimination and how individual initiatives from below can develop into communal agency based on solidarity.
Hincu, Adela-Gabriela: Accounting for the "social" in state socialist Romania, 1960s-1980s: contexts and genealogies. Budapest : Central European University, 2019: http://www.etd.ceu.edu/2019/hincu_adela-gabriela.pdf
This dissertation reconstructs the contexts and genealogies of scientific thought on the “social” in state socialist Romania in the 1960s–1980s. New ideas and practices of observing, analyzing, and intervening in the social realities of socialist society emerged beginning in the early 1960s, originally in debates over the canonical disciplines of Marxist-Leninist social science (historical materialism, scientific socialism, and Marxist sociology). These were further developed by Marxist revisionist and humanist Marxist thought on the relationship between individuals and society in socialism, which decentered the collectivist ethos characteristic of “dogmatic” Marxism-Leninist philosophy for most of the 1950s. Made possible by the Marxist humanist breakthrough of the early 1960s, Marxist-Leninist sociology was subsequently established as a separate discipline at the Academy of Social and Political Sciences and at the University of Bucharest. Institutional and intellectual constraints and possibilities were differently configured in these two contexts. For the case of the Academy of Social and Political Sciences, the dissertation emphasizes the dynamic between local, transnational, and global frameworks of knowledge production, and the role of Eastern bloc cooperation in the field of sociology in particular. In the Romanian context, the interplay between local and transnational frames of reference resulted in studies of the social structure of socialist society that sought to rework concepts of everyday Marxism-Leninism—as formulated in party pronouncements and translated into the planning of knowledge production in the social sciences. The most notable among these was the concept of “social homogenization.” Developed since the second half of the 1960s, through to the qualitative turn of the late 1970s, and into the 1980s, its history illustrates the interplay between legitimization and criticism characteristic of Marxist-Leninist sociology. Several student cohorts were trained at the University of Bucharest between 1965, when the sociology department was first established, through to 1977, when the department was disbanded, and in a very restricted sense until the end of the 1980s. As taught at the university, sociology drew on Marxist, interwar, and Western sociological sources. This idiosyncratic intellectual blend underpinned large-scale empirical research on the two main sociological issues of social development (especially in relation to industrialization and urbanization) and scientific management (in relation to social planning). By outlining the context of sociology as practiced at the university alongside oral history accounts by sociology students trained at the time, generational, intellectual, and existential fault lines come to the fore beneath a commonly shared understanding of sociology as an apolitical science of “social engineering” with roots in the interwar period. The second part of the dissertation proposes a “reverse genealogy” of three themes which became part of the imaginary of postsocialist intellectual thought on the social: participation, equality, and welfare. It explores how the three intellectual, institutional, and generational contexts identified in the first part of the dissertation played out in sociological research on mass culture, women’s emancipation, and the quality of life in the 1960s–80s.
In my dissertation I explore the legacy of eugenics in the history of Hungarian medicine. In this project I analyze how gender, race/ethnicity, and class play role in shaping medical concerns. And how do medical sciences contribute to empowerment in different historical periods. I was initially interested in how geneticists are producing knowledge about Roma people within Europe and more specifically in Hungary. I started my work with one very narrow question in mind: whether these works contribute to the geneticization of race/ethnicity as Troy Duster, Jonathan Kahn, Dorothy Roberts, Carolyn M. Rouse and many other scholars claim, and if yes, in what ways they do. I was interested in contemporary medical genetic discussions but I was aware that this discourse has continuities with the medical genetic discussions of the socialist period. In order to explore the commonalities and differences between these two, I did 35 interviews with medical geneticists and biologists who take part in research, teaching, or genetic counseling. These were in-depth semi-structured interviews in which I asked about their specific fields, about the continuities that they see with socialist medical aims regarding reproduction, how they see the role of race/ethnicity, gender, and class in shaping genetic concerns, and how would they describe the social relevance of their work. In the interviews I inquired how they view their work in relation to eugenics and their replies pointed towards connections between their work and the eugenic arguments of the early twentieth century. Thus, I became interested in the comparative analysis of eugenic thinking in the Hungarian medical discourse in two historically distant periods. Specifically, the early 1900s and 1910s when eugenics entered the Hungarian medical discourse with the present medical genetic concerns closely connected with the socialist medical practice. Medical genetics as a discipline emerged in the 1960s as a result of biotechnological developments. In the Hungarian literature medical genetic studies were first published around the end of the 60s. Institutions, that incorporated medical genetic knowledge to aid reproductive decision making such as genetic counseling institutes, were established in the 70s. Among the early concerns the degeneration of the population appeared similarly to the early eugenic discourse thus I think it is possible to establish connections between these two. In the early medical genetic publications of the 1970s the main concern was the possible transmission of ’bad’ genes for the future generations and the role that medical genetics could play to avoid that outcome. Their focus was on the female body but explicitly racial or ethnic concerns were not present in genetic argumentation until the early 1980s, although ethnicity based medical studies have appeared in the 1960s and 70s. The aim of population genetic works is to compare the genetic structure of Roma and non-Roma Hungarians in order to design screening panels that would improve the management of their healthcare. I think regarding these medical efforts one of the question to look at is how genetic knowledge empowers people at the intersection of the social categories of gender, class, race/ethnicity? In what ways do geneticists molecularize these social categories? And what are the possible ethical consequences of this practice?
Lukic, Dejan: A strong class of serious scholars: the power dynamics of knowledge production in the earth science. Budapest : Central European University, 2019: http://www.etd.ceu.edu/2020/lukic_dejan.pdf
This dissertation examines the social and political factors that conditioned the establishment of the earth sciences in Serbia during the long nineteenth century. It presents the development of scientific circles, institutions, and practices on the European periphery and analyses the power dynamics that stood behind them. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Serbia was an Ottoman province that was striving to become an independent nation state, in which it ultimately succeeded in 1878. Science was in Serbia intrinsically dependent on the process of state-building and the formation of state elites, in which scholars became the carriers of the process of the transformation of society. The formation of scientific circles, their recognition in Serbian society, and the establishment of institutional, educational, and research practices depended on their successful embeddedness in the contemporary political, intellectual, and social networks. This study exemplifies how notions of expertise and epistemic fields were constructed in the earth sciences, and how scholars divided research and responsibilities among themselves. Through the examination of personal notes, diaries, correspondence, and scientific publications, I have identified the power dynamics and strategies that led some of them to achieve the status of experts, recognised as such either by their colleagues, or by the state administration. In this respect, I have given special attention to the role that state and politics had on the dynamics of these circles, as well as to the role international scientific networks played in the recognition of their expertise. Particular focus is given to the careers of Jovan Žujović and Jovan Cvijić, who established scientific circles around them. Žujović became the primary organiser of scientific research in mineralogy, petrography, geology, palaeontology, and seismology by mobilising his students to study abroad and conduct research in earth sciences. The expansion of the circle led to the creation and division of separate scientific sub-disciplines in which scholars established their expertise. Through the interaction with international scientific networks, these scholars were looking for recognition and affirmation of Belgrade as a new international scientific centre. In this endeavour, Jovan Cvijić turned out to be the most successful. Because of his pragmatically chosen topics, he managed to distinguish himself both internationally and in Serbian public opinion. Both Žujović and Cvijić managed to assert themselves as the founding figures of Serbian science, yet that role depended on their social and political capital as much as it did on their academic capital. Science was strongly embedded in social and political processes and its development was conditioned by successful interaction across multiple social networks.
