Fulbright Visiting Professor on Post-Socialist Social Movements

Tuesday, November 18, 2014 3:00 PM to 4:15 PM EST
Innovation Hall, #132

Fulbright Visiting Professor Agnes Gagyi will give a talk titled "Global Crisis, New Mobilizations, and the Fate of Democracy: Reconsidering a World-Systems Perspective on Post-Socialism." 

Talk description: Propelled by new mobilizations in the wake of global economic crisis, a rising debate in the US and the EU speaks about the crisis of representative democracy, and the threats or opportunities populism or participative democracy could bring on to old democratic institutions. In the background of that new discourse on the crisis of representative democracy, there is a half explicit narrative of decline. This narrative links the crisis of representative democracy, or 'post-democratic' order, to financialization and neoliberalism. The high peak preceding that decline cannot but be identified in the Fordist welfare era of countries at the core of global economy. I will take the example of a semi-peripheral country, and its post-socialist democratic transition, to point out the limitations of that narrative, and consequently, of the new debate on movements and democracy. I will set forth the contradictions of "democratization" in Hungary not as an example of exotic distortions of the universal history of democracy, but as an inherent part of that history, which needs to be reformulated to include non-core positions, too.

Bio: Agnes Gagyi is social movements researcher and activist, with a background in social anthropology and political economy. She writes on Eastern European politics and social movements in a long-term global historical perspective, inspired by world-systems analysis. She received her PhD in 2011 from the University of Pécs, is Adjunct Professor at the Eszterházy Károly College in Eger, and presently conducts Fulbright post-doctoral research at Mason entitled "The Transnational History of Contemporary Hungarian Politics and Social Movements." 

 

Hosted by Mason's Department of Sociology and Anthropology, and Russian and Eurasian Studies Program.