Cultural Studies paper by Horváth, Györgyi
Self-Identity and Community Through Social Media: The Digital Diasporas of Hungarians in the UK (Accepted) Withdrawn
Type of Abstract (select):Abstract (max. 250 words):
This paper discusses the digital communities of Hungarians in the UK: these communities (typically Facebook groups, blogs or other interactive websites) started to pop up on the internet in large numbers since the mid-2010s, when the intra-EU migration of Hungarians to the UK increased, and when the experience of migration – due to the ubiquity of the internet and that of digital technologies – has growingly become digitally mediated not only in Europe, but around the world (see e.g. Diminescu & Loveluck 2014, Georgiou 2013, Marino 2015). Although scholarly attention on Hungarian expat communities – and Hungarians living in “Western diasporas” in general – has been on the rise for a while, to this day not much has been said about the media-related aspects of this story, despite the fact that today much of the day-to-day public life of these communities occurs on the internet, in online spaces. The present paper focuses on these spaces and conceptualises them as “spaces of digital togetherness” (Marino 2015), i.e. where diasporic experiences and identities are constructed and negotiated on a daily basis, and which act as a kind of “social glue” that connects Hungarian expats / migrants with each other. The paper uses critical discourse analysis combined with digital ethnography in order to 1) identify what Hungarian expats/migrants do with media, what typical interactions they have in these online spaces; and 2) how they create, through the use of these spaces, a sense of cultural belonging, that is a specifically Hungarian digital (trans)cultural identity.
Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Gyorgyi Horvath is a media, literature & gender scholar, with a PhD in Media (2019) from the London School of Economics and another PhD in Literature (2006) from the University of Pecs. Originally from Hungary, she used to teach Literature & Gender at the University of Pecs, ELTE University (Budapest) and the Balassi Institute (Budapest), before she switched fields to Media and moved to London. Her latest book, Utazo elmeletek (Budapest: Balassi, 2014), studied the depoliticisation of ”Western” cultural Marxism in post-socialist Eastern-European contexts, and in 2015 won the prestigious Erdody Award of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.