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Over the past decade, the Hungarian government led by Fidesz has initiated fundamental changes to the country’s research landscape. It has restructured the research institutes of the 200-year-old Hungarian Academy of Sciences, privatized most universities, and invested heavily in new research institutions and think tanks, particularly in the humanities and social sciences. These have often produced what looks like the results of “objective,” empirically based scientific research. In reality, these institutions have consistently supported the political agendas of the government, for example through specific, heavily normative narration of their research results or ideologically guided and biased questionnaires. Judit Gárdos investigates how researchers within these institutions carry out this distinctive mode of social scientific knowledge production and compares her findings with a parallel analysis of the scientific practices of institutions within Hungary’s established academic sphere. She examines the accessibility of non-confidential social science research data, pursues the necessary steps to obtain them, and analyses the normative and argumentative structures that shape social scientific knowledge production, focusing also on how research data are transformed into published texts.
Recommended Reading
Gárdos, Judit (2024). “Questions and Explanations in Sociology: A Science Studies Field Study.” Science and Technology Studies 37 (1): 44–59. https://doi.org/10.23987/sts.111856.
Gárdos, Judit, Sára Hungler, and Miklós Illéssy (2024): “Anti-pluralism, Labour Market Policy and the Pandemic: Political Uses and Social Consequences of COVID-19 in Hungary.” Social and Legal Studies 33 (6): 995–1014. https://doi.org/10.1177/09646639241233939.
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2026/2027
Judit Gárdos, PhD
Senior Research Fellow, Head of the Research Documentation Centre
ELTE Centre for Social Sciences, Budapest
from September 2026 to January 2027
Born in 1979 in Budapest
MA in Sociology, Eötvös Loránd University of Sciences, PhD in Cultural Studies, University of Pécs
Fellowship
Yehudit und Yehuda Elkana-Fellow
Arbeitsvorhaben
Social Scientific Knowledge-Making and Its Actors in Hungary. The Analysis and Action Plan of the Hungarian Academy Staff Forum
In her project at the Wissenschaftskolleg, Judit Gárdos continues her long-standing research on how scientific data are produced, how scientific explanation is conducted, and the normative dimensions of social scientific practices. She empirically investigates scientific discourses, argumentations, and narratives in Hungarian social scientific knowledge production, in the framework of a project of the Hungarian Academy Staff Forum, originally established in 2019 as a bottom-up movement and now operating as a civil organization.Over the past decade, the Hungarian government led by Fidesz has initiated fundamental changes to the country’s research landscape. It has restructured the research institutes of the 200-year-old Hungarian Academy of Sciences, privatized most universities, and invested heavily in new research institutions and think tanks, particularly in the humanities and social sciences. These have often produced what looks like the results of “objective,” empirically based scientific research. In reality, these institutions have consistently supported the political agendas of the government, for example through specific, heavily normative narration of their research results or ideologically guided and biased questionnaires. Judit Gárdos investigates how researchers within these institutions carry out this distinctive mode of social scientific knowledge production and compares her findings with a parallel analysis of the scientific practices of institutions within Hungary’s established academic sphere. She examines the accessibility of non-confidential social science research data, pursues the necessary steps to obtain them, and analyses the normative and argumentative structures that shape social scientific knowledge production, focusing also on how research data are transformed into published texts.
Recommended Reading
Gárdos, Judit (2024). “Questions and Explanations in Sociology: A Science Studies Field Study.” Science and Technology Studies 37 (1): 44–59. https://doi.org/10.23987/sts.111856.
Gárdos, Judit, Sára Hungler, and Miklós Illéssy (2024): “Anti-pluralism, Labour Market Policy and the Pandemic: Political Uses and Social Consequences of COVID-19 in Hungary.” Social and Legal Studies 33 (6): 995–1014. https://doi.org/10.1177/09646639241233939.