The transnational history of Hungarian economic geography and spatial planning in the state-socialist era, 1949-1989
The the aim of this project is to apply recent literature on the geographies of knowledge and policy mobilities with global and transnational history to reveal the international knowledge networks, geopolitical relations and world economic integration strategies that affected Hungarian state-socialist economic geography and spatial planning. This research looks at expert connections both between the center-semiperiphery and the semiperiphery-periphery in order to reevaluate the history of Hungarian state-socialist spatial planning in a transnational perspective.
Poliko Podcast #4: The Transperiphery Movement Exhibition: Towards a Global History of Peripheral Connections
Dávid Karas talks with Zoltán Ginelli, a Hungarian critical geographer whose research repositions the semi-peripheral experience of Hungarian modernization in a global context, by studying the many points of connections linking peoples, ideas, expertise, institutions and political utopias in Hungary to other peripheries in the postcolonial Global South. Zoltán has co-curated with Eszter Szakács a fantastic exhibition in Budapest entitled Transperiphery Movement, where he examines these trans-peripheral connections in collaboration with a host of artists and scholars. We talk about Zoltán’s own research on postcoloniality, race and global history from an Eastern European perspective, and the themes through which the exhibition examines these topics.
Transperiphery Movement: Colonia Hungaria
The Transperiphery Movement attempts to recapture revolutionary action by tracing forgotten interperipheral circulations between Eastern Europe and the Global South. The transcolonial geographic history of “Colonia Hungaria” – a semi-fictitious Hungarian colonial ecumen – questions, dispositions, disorders and challenges hegemonic histories of global racial-colonial capitalism.
Decolonizing the Non-Colonizers? Historicizing Eastern Europe in Global Colonialism
What would it mean to ‘decolonize’ Eastern Europe? We aim to answer by situating Eastern Europe within broader colonial, anti-colonial and decolonial projects, to understand how the region’s historically and geographically shifting relations to coloniality and race inform current political dynamics.
Call for Papers | American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting | Seattle, WA | April 7–11, 2021 | Virtual Session convened by Zoltán Ginelli and Jonathan McCombs
Uncertain Notes from the Semi-periphery
Public and academic discussions have completely ignored the fact that the recent wave of anti-racism and decololonization movements have sparked intensive reactions from Eastern European countries, including Hungary, for the first time. These reactions dominantly focused on Western events but never actually defined decolonialism, nor looked at the global, geographical implications of colonialism. In Hungary, the local relevance of racism and decolonialism has been framed in a rather reductive manner (anti-Semitism, conditions of Romas), and there have been no serious discussions about the country’s specific historical relations to global colonialism, or any criticism of Eurocentric and racist knowledge. The presentation explores these issues and argues for Hungarian relevance to decolonization, and introduces in this context the main concept of a forthcoming exhibition project, The Transperiphery Movement.
The Return of the Colonial: Understanding the Role of Eastern Europe in Global Colonisation Debates and Decolonial Struggles
Online workshop on 10 September Organisers: Romina Istratii – School of Oriental and African Studies, University of LondonMárton Demeter – National University of Public Service, HungaryZoltán Ginelli – Universität Leipzig, Leibniz ScienceCampus “Eastern Europe – […]
Amikor Aczél György volt a váci börtön titkos tervezőirodájának raktárosa
Perczel Károly, az 1971-es Országos Településhálózat-fejlesztési Koncepció szellemi atyjának személyes visszaemlékezései alapján állítottam össze egy anyagot a 2016-os kutatásaimból. Hosszan ír arról, hogy hogyan dolgoztattak tervezőként különböző szakembereket a váci fegyházban – afféle saraska teamekben – az újjáépítés és a Rákosi alatti fejlesztések érdekében. Ehhez a csapathoz került Aczél György is.
Phantom of the past: Postsocialist contradictions in Tibor Mendöl’s republished “Introduction to Geography” textbook
This paper aims to unravel the contextual layers of the postsocialist republishing of a prominent Hungarian geographer’s textbook originally written in the 1950s, which is considered here as a vehicle of the contested narrativity in […]
Zoltán Ginelli 