Hanna Orsolya Vincze
Babes-Bolyai University, Communications, Department Member
Online hate speech, especially on social media platforms, is the subject of both policy and political debate in Europe and globally - from the fragmentation of network publics to echo chambers and bubble phenomena, from networked outrage... more
Online hate speech, especially on social media platforms, is the subject of both policy and political debate in Europe and globally - from the fragmentation of network publics to echo chambers and bubble phenomena, from networked outrage to networked populism, from trolls and bullies to propaganda and non-linear cyberwarfare. Both researchers and Facebook Community standards see the identification of the potential targets of hateful or antagonistic speech as key to classifying and distinguishing the latter from arguments that represent political viewpoints protected by freedom of expression rights. This research is an exploratory analysis of mentions of targets of hate speech in comments in the context of 106 public Facebook pages in Romanian and Hungarian from January 2015 to December 2017. A total of 1.8 million comments were collected through API interrogation and analyzed using a text-mining niche-dictionaries approach and co-occurrence analysis to reveal connections to events o...
Research Interests:
Public discussions of the recent rise in the number of refugees and asylum seekers, commonly referred to as "the refugee crisis" employ recurrent references to religion. This paper investigates the salience of religion in Romanian and... more
Public discussions of the recent rise in the number of refugees and asylum seekers, commonly referred to as "the refugee crisis" employ recurrent references to religion. This paper investigates the salience of religion in Romanian and Hungarian online news and comments. It aims to contribute to better understanding the role religion plays in the public understanding of the refugee crisis, and also to the wider issue of the role of religion in public discussions. It also aims to identify the specific local discourses that the local audiences revert to when making sense of and commenting on foreign news. The analysis applies corpus linguistic and discourse analytical approaches to a constructed week sample of Romanian and Hungarian news and their comments. The main referential strategies identified with regard to religion are generic religion, religion as difference, visible religion and religious threats. Similarities of the two news cultures point to continuities that transcend national boundaries, and are connected to wider trends in the role of religion in the public understanding of the refugee crisis. References to religion are also shown to intersect with local political discourses. In the wider context of the European public sphere, and the debates over its secular nature or desecularization, the results suggest that the mediatization and politization of religion in the context of the refugee crisis needs to be understood as a "secular return" rather than desecularization.
The 2015 refugee crisis has held the attention of Romanian news media as well, as one of the most challenging issues for the European Union in the last decade, even though Romania is not situated on the main routes on which refugees... more
The 2015 refugee crisis has held the attention of Romanian news media as well, as one of the most challenging issues for the European Union in the last decade, even though Romania is not situated on the main routes on which refugees arrive. Our research focuses on the variation of issue-specific news frames in time, according to media type, and by the countries covered, also addressing the locally salient issue of religion. Articles from the websites of the top-ranked six Romanian news outlets were analyzed, including three quality papers and three tabloids (N=6,183), from 1 April 2015 to 30 September 2017. Using a computer-assisted, clusters-based frame analysis, we identify six primary, mutually exclusive and six secondary, nonexclusive frames: European crisis, context/victimization, relocation/distribution, international conflict, and social problem, national costs, religious issues, US immigration policy, humanitarian/international. The variations in their salience follow the general European tendency toward securitization. At the same time, the emphasis on the issue as a European crisis indicates a tendency characteristic of Central and Eastern European media coverage. Co-occurrence patterns of frames and specific countries also indicate that the salience of some globally recurrent frames varies by countries covered.
Research Interests:
Writing after the failure of the 1848 Hungarian revolution, József Eötvös, himself a prominent politician and novelist, grappled with the sources of the failure and conditions of success of social and political reforms. In his monumental... more
Writing after the failure of the 1848 Hungarian revolution, József Eötvös, himself a prominent politician and novelist, grappled with the sources of the failure and conditions of success of social and political reforms. In his monumental work, The Dominant Ideas of the Nineteenth Century and their Impact on the State, he proposed that in order to understand the behaviour of the masses and design social and political reforms that will have popular support, one needed to understand the meanings people assigned to popular ideas—as opposed to meanings assigned to them by theorists. Popularity, in this approach, had three components: ideas around which people rallied, emotions that connected them to these ideas, and actions people undertook in their name. The way towards understanding these components was to understand the culture of the people in its various manifestations, from popular religiosity to literary and material culture. By re-reading Eötvös’s work focusing on his conception of popular ideas, this paper investigates how the longstanding tension between popularity and the distrust in populism was articulated in a classic of nineteenth century central European political thought.
Online hate speech, especially on social media platforms, is the subject of both policy and political debate in Europe and globally - from the fragmentation of network publics to echo chambers and bubble phenomena, from networked outrage... more
Online hate speech, especially on social media platforms, is the subject of both policy and political debate in Europe and globally - from the fragmentation of network publics to echo chambers and bubble phenomena, from networked outrage to networked populism, from trolls and bullies to propaganda and non-linear cyberwarfare. Both researchers and Facebook Community standards see the identification of the potential targets of hateful or antagonistic speech as key to classifying and distinguishing the latter from arguments that represent political viewpoints protected by freedom of expression rights. This research is an exploratory analysis of mentions of targets of hate speech in comments in the context of 106 public Facebook pages in Romanian and Hungarian from January 2015 to December 2017. A total of 1.8 million comments were collected through API interrogation and analyzed using a text-mining niche-dictionaries approach and co-occurrence analysis to reveal connections to events on the media and political agenda and discursive patterns. Findings indicate that in both countries the most prominent targets mentioned are connected to current events on the political and media agenda, that targets are most frequently mentioned in contexts created by politicians and news media, and that discursive patterns in both countries involve the proliferation of similar stereotypes about certain target groups.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
The economic crisis and the policies proposed in response to it have held the attention of news media for many years. This article argues that the frequent use of the term ‘crisis’ as a catchphrase signals the presence of a journalistic... more
The economic crisis and the policies proposed in response to it have held the attention of news media for many years. This article argues that the frequent use of the term ‘crisis’ as a catchphrase signals the presence of a journalistic frame, which possesses both generic and issue-specific features. The crisis-frame is analytically described along the four structural dimensions identified by Pan and Kosicki, using both content analytical arguments and close reading of characteristic passages. The crisis-frame is shown to have intersected with other local discursive constructs like the reform of the state or the problems of unemployment and migration. The article thus discusses substantive features of the news media of an Eastern European country, on which framing research is notoriously scarce. At the same time, it also contributes to the wider theoretical debate surrounding frame analysis, by describing how a media issue takes on generic features and becomes applicable to various topics and spheres of life.
Access via CEEOL NL Germany zott internetes tevékenységek közé tartozik. Arra a kérdésre, hogy mely online tevékenységek nincsenek engedélyezve, a leggyakoribb válasz az online közösségi profil készítése volt; a romániai szülők többsége... more
Access via CEEOL NL Germany zott internetes tevékenységek közé tartozik. Arra a kérdésre, hogy mely online tevékenységek nincsenek engedélyezve, a leggyakoribb válasz az online közösségi profil készítése volt; a romániai szülők többsége (54%) is ezt a ...
A magyar nyelvű fordítások különös jelentőséggel bírnak a kora újkori Magyarországon. A 17. század elejére a magyar nyelv a kultúra legitim nyelvévé válik az országban. Noha a hivatalos eljárások és a természettudomány nyelve továbbra is... more
A magyar nyelvű fordítások különös jelentőséggel bírnak a kora újkori Magyarországon. A 17. század elejére a magyar nyelv a kultúra legitim nyelvévé válik az országban. Noha a hivatalos eljárások és a természettudomány nyelve továbbra is többnyire a latin, a magyar ...
Abstract: Online social networking has recently become a major mass media topic, a source of an optimistic buzz, but also the focus point of various social anxieties. In parallel with the unprecedented rise of social media use among... more
Abstract: Online social networking has recently become a major mass media topic, a source of an optimistic buzz, but also the focus point of various social anxieties. In parallel with the unprecedented rise of social media use among Romanian internet users, Romanian mass ...
The option of addressing the formation of marginal spaces in this volume in relation to the racialization of labour goes beyond the initial framing of our research based on a spatial approach, which proposed to analyse the social and... more
The option of addressing the formation of marginal spaces in this volume in relation to the racialization of labour goes beyond the initial framing of our research based on a spatial approach, which proposed to analyse the social and cultural formation of “Tsigane ghettos” in Romania in a European context. In its early phase of planning, the paradigm of social exclusion informed our research, while we sought to address processes that lie behind the formation of precarious housing areas, such as spatialization and racialization of poverty. No surprise, these territories were predominantly inhabited by persons and groups (self-)identified as Roma and labelled as țigănie. As we moved forward with deciphering the structural processes behind these situations, it became necessary to expand our explicative frame from the spatial exclusion approach towards a more systemic understanding of ghettoization, which depicts how categories of racialized labourers are produced and confined within the marginalized spaces by the capitalist system.
The sites of our empirical research consist of five Romanian cities, all of
them administrative centres of their corresponding counties (Călărași, Cluj-Napoca, Miercurea-Ciuc, Ploiești, and Târgu-Mureș), with diverse histories of urbanization and economic development (as they have been affected differently by deindustrialization), but which share similar patterns of pushing towards the peripheries the impoverished, mostly Roma dwellers who cannot afford housing on the private market. The five cities differ in terms of their ethnic balances between Romanians, Hungarians, and Roma, and also in terms of the diversity of local Roma groups differentiated alongside diverse factors (traditional/spoitori, căldărari, or Gábor versus assimilated Roma, or Hungarian versus Romanian Roma and Turkish versus Romanian Roma) and relations among them. These cities have different economic and social histories, current revenues and wealth, and political agency (public authorities, local politics, and civil society). They are not regarded as a “representative sample” of Romanian cities but as loci of a set of representative processes of capitalist development in Romania that led to the precarization of the working class and the formation of marginal, severely impoverished residential spaces, with inadequate infrastructure and unclear legal status. The chapters rely on quantitative and qualitative data about the five selected cities, including the socio-demographic characteristics of populations living in the twenty urban areas that we have visited, as compared to the general populations of the cities. [...] ... we conducted interviews with NGO representatives, politicians, local authorities, officials from territorial agencies of national
public institutions, social workers, and so on, and, most importantly, [with the persons living in these areas. Some of our interviewees did not
hold positions directly focused on the urban poor or the Roma, but they
played important roles in shaping the economic future of the cities. We
also undertook content analyses of documents on social and housing
policies and, separately, on the media representations of segregated housing areas and their inhabitants.
For each of the five cities, our joint research revealed the existence of
several deprived and marginalized areas, characterized by different scales of exclusion and poverty, and different degrees of their juxtaposition with ethnic enclaves and racialized stigmatization, respectively, by diverse grades of connectedness to the rest of the cities or even by various forms of resistance towards marginalization. [...]
As space is a fundamental dimension of capital and labour accumulation, our methodology was, from the onset, devised to capture the ways in which localities are produced at the intersection of various forces and, simultaneously, to allow us to see different intersections depending on housing, urban development, social policies, and media discourses. However, our volume is not based on a comparative case methodology in the strict sense of the term. We neither intend to draw comparisons and classifications of locations subtracted from a representative sample of marginalized spaces inhabited by racialized labourers, nor to compare the capitalist development of five Romanian cities. Rather, we investigate processes running across the locations of our fieldwork, processes which display similarities and differences, and which carry the localized influence of more general global processes of unequal development, accumulation by dispossession, labour precarization, and spatial segregation based on class position and racial categorization. This does not mean that our five cities were randomly selected. On the contrary, we purposefully selected cities of comparable sizes that function as administrative centres for their corresponding counties from different historical regions of Romania, and which differ along the lines of those historical, political, economic, and social factors that have explanatory power for the emergence of marginalized and racialized areas at urban peripheries. We construct the micro–macro or local–global linkages through social theory, in a way similar with Burawoy’s (2009) approach of the extended case method. The “cases” that we refer to in our chapters are not geographically determined territories but issue-oriented cases, dimensions of analysis which highlight different aspects of the economically productive role of the interconnectedness between spatial marginality and racialization of
labour for capitalist development. [...]
The theory that transforms our empirical material into “the case of something” is constructed at the intersection of dependency theories, de-proletarization debates, postcolonial and decolonial studies, global anthropologies of labour, theories of postsocialism, and Romani studies.
Following Burawoy’s reflexive ethnography, we aim to adapt our chosen
theories to explain old issues (such as racialization of labour and spatial
marginalization) in new contexts, situated at one of the semi-peripheries
of global capitalism marked by the disentanglement of really existing
socialism and EU integration.
The different chapters of this book complement each other in offering a substantiation of our arguments on different levels that we touch upon. [...] Correspondingly, our book is divided into two larger parts: the first
part deals with the creation of racialized labour and spaces of marginality, while the second part investigates how invisibility is produced. In the first part, individual chapters identify and describe various dimensions of the racialization of precarious labour and spatial marginalization. Norbert Petrovici analyses the spatiality of capital accumulation and of racialized labour produced by the capitalist political economy, rendered to reside in segregated and relatively homogeneous parts of the cities in terms of ethnicity, education, and occupational status. Enikő Vincze depicts several types of ghettoization or varying patterns of the formation of housing areas that are carved out physically and symbolically from the rest of the built urban environment and within which material destitution overlaps with ethnic seclusion. Cristina Rat explores the pressures to commodify work embedded in “activation” policies, increasingly salient after the neoliberal turn of welfare states and the deregulation of labour. In the second part, each chapter explores a different dimension on which the invisibilization of racialized labour and spaces of marginality occurs. Anca Simionca reveals the kind of imaginaries guiding the development of the city and the labour market, how these visions largely ignore the spatially and socially marginalized categories, and by that directly contribute to their formation and maintenance. Orsolya Vincze investigates to what degree the ideologies used for justifying inequalities are making appeal to the racialization of marginalized spaces and precarious labour, in other words how the moral problem of inequality is made invisible and “absolved” by portraying the disadvantaged as alien and inferior. Cătălin Berescu critically engages with the ways of making use of the typology of
ghettoes by different decision-maker actors in order to naturalize their
existence and thus conceal the political agency behind their constitution.
Thus, each chapter analyses in detail particular instances and processualities (or “cases”) within the broader dynamics of labour racialization and spatial marginalization, and of making them invisible.
We acknowledge that the processes we analyse are not country-specific,
and most importantly, not locality-specific, but they are global processes
of contemporary capitalism. Accordingly, in the concluding chapter,
Giovanni Picker offers a zoom-out from Romania towards other territories across space and time, stretching from the Global North and to the South, and evolving from the colonial history of capitalism towards contemporary neoliberal governance. As such, it highlights similar and divergent patterns of the racialization of labour and the segregation of precarious workers at marginal spaces, and the invisibilization of their lives and labour.
The sites of our empirical research consist of five Romanian cities, all of
them administrative centres of their corresponding counties (Călărași, Cluj-Napoca, Miercurea-Ciuc, Ploiești, and Târgu-Mureș), with diverse histories of urbanization and economic development (as they have been affected differently by deindustrialization), but which share similar patterns of pushing towards the peripheries the impoverished, mostly Roma dwellers who cannot afford housing on the private market. The five cities differ in terms of their ethnic balances between Romanians, Hungarians, and Roma, and also in terms of the diversity of local Roma groups differentiated alongside diverse factors (traditional/spoitori, căldărari, or Gábor versus assimilated Roma, or Hungarian versus Romanian Roma and Turkish versus Romanian Roma) and relations among them. These cities have different economic and social histories, current revenues and wealth, and political agency (public authorities, local politics, and civil society). They are not regarded as a “representative sample” of Romanian cities but as loci of a set of representative processes of capitalist development in Romania that led to the precarization of the working class and the formation of marginal, severely impoverished residential spaces, with inadequate infrastructure and unclear legal status. The chapters rely on quantitative and qualitative data about the five selected cities, including the socio-demographic characteristics of populations living in the twenty urban areas that we have visited, as compared to the general populations of the cities. [...] ... we conducted interviews with NGO representatives, politicians, local authorities, officials from territorial agencies of national
public institutions, social workers, and so on, and, most importantly, [with the persons living in these areas. Some of our interviewees did not
hold positions directly focused on the urban poor or the Roma, but they
played important roles in shaping the economic future of the cities. We
also undertook content analyses of documents on social and housing
policies and, separately, on the media representations of segregated housing areas and their inhabitants.
For each of the five cities, our joint research revealed the existence of
several deprived and marginalized areas, characterized by different scales of exclusion and poverty, and different degrees of their juxtaposition with ethnic enclaves and racialized stigmatization, respectively, by diverse grades of connectedness to the rest of the cities or even by various forms of resistance towards marginalization. [...]
As space is a fundamental dimension of capital and labour accumulation, our methodology was, from the onset, devised to capture the ways in which localities are produced at the intersection of various forces and, simultaneously, to allow us to see different intersections depending on housing, urban development, social policies, and media discourses. However, our volume is not based on a comparative case methodology in the strict sense of the term. We neither intend to draw comparisons and classifications of locations subtracted from a representative sample of marginalized spaces inhabited by racialized labourers, nor to compare the capitalist development of five Romanian cities. Rather, we investigate processes running across the locations of our fieldwork, processes which display similarities and differences, and which carry the localized influence of more general global processes of unequal development, accumulation by dispossession, labour precarization, and spatial segregation based on class position and racial categorization. This does not mean that our five cities were randomly selected. On the contrary, we purposefully selected cities of comparable sizes that function as administrative centres for their corresponding counties from different historical regions of Romania, and which differ along the lines of those historical, political, economic, and social factors that have explanatory power for the emergence of marginalized and racialized areas at urban peripheries. We construct the micro–macro or local–global linkages through social theory, in a way similar with Burawoy’s (2009) approach of the extended case method. The “cases” that we refer to in our chapters are not geographically determined territories but issue-oriented cases, dimensions of analysis which highlight different aspects of the economically productive role of the interconnectedness between spatial marginality and racialization of
labour for capitalist development. [...]
The theory that transforms our empirical material into “the case of something” is constructed at the intersection of dependency theories, de-proletarization debates, postcolonial and decolonial studies, global anthropologies of labour, theories of postsocialism, and Romani studies.
Following Burawoy’s reflexive ethnography, we aim to adapt our chosen
theories to explain old issues (such as racialization of labour and spatial
marginalization) in new contexts, situated at one of the semi-peripheries
of global capitalism marked by the disentanglement of really existing
socialism and EU integration.
The different chapters of this book complement each other in offering a substantiation of our arguments on different levels that we touch upon. [...] Correspondingly, our book is divided into two larger parts: the first
part deals with the creation of racialized labour and spaces of marginality, while the second part investigates how invisibility is produced. In the first part, individual chapters identify and describe various dimensions of the racialization of precarious labour and spatial marginalization. Norbert Petrovici analyses the spatiality of capital accumulation and of racialized labour produced by the capitalist political economy, rendered to reside in segregated and relatively homogeneous parts of the cities in terms of ethnicity, education, and occupational status. Enikő Vincze depicts several types of ghettoization or varying patterns of the formation of housing areas that are carved out physically and symbolically from the rest of the built urban environment and within which material destitution overlaps with ethnic seclusion. Cristina Rat explores the pressures to commodify work embedded in “activation” policies, increasingly salient after the neoliberal turn of welfare states and the deregulation of labour. In the second part, each chapter explores a different dimension on which the invisibilization of racialized labour and spaces of marginality occurs. Anca Simionca reveals the kind of imaginaries guiding the development of the city and the labour market, how these visions largely ignore the spatially and socially marginalized categories, and by that directly contribute to their formation and maintenance. Orsolya Vincze investigates to what degree the ideologies used for justifying inequalities are making appeal to the racialization of marginalized spaces and precarious labour, in other words how the moral problem of inequality is made invisible and “absolved” by portraying the disadvantaged as alien and inferior. Cătălin Berescu critically engages with the ways of making use of the typology of
ghettoes by different decision-maker actors in order to naturalize their
existence and thus conceal the political agency behind their constitution.
Thus, each chapter analyses in detail particular instances and processualities (or “cases”) within the broader dynamics of labour racialization and spatial marginalization, and of making them invisible.
We acknowledge that the processes we analyse are not country-specific,
and most importantly, not locality-specific, but they are global processes
of contemporary capitalism. Accordingly, in the concluding chapter,
Giovanni Picker offers a zoom-out from Romania towards other territories across space and time, stretching from the Global North and to the South, and evolving from the colonial history of capitalism towards contemporary neoliberal governance. As such, it highlights similar and divergent patterns of the racialization of labour and the segregation of precarious workers at marginal spaces, and the invisibilization of their lives and labour.
Research Interests:
The research project was supported between 2011-2016 by a grant of the Romanian National Authority for Scientific Research, CNCS—UEFISCDI, project number PN-II-ID-PCE-2011-3-0354, director Enikő Vincze RESULTS: - Two edited volumes (2016,... more
The research project was supported between 2011-2016 by a grant of the Romanian National Authority for Scientific Research, CNCS—UEFISCDI, project number PN-II-ID-PCE-2011-3-0354, director Enikő Vincze
RESULTS:
- Two edited volumes (2016, 2018)
- Three documentary films (2016)
- A special issue of Studia UBB. Sociologia, 2013
RESULTS:
- Two edited volumes (2016, 2018)
- Three documentary films (2016)
- A special issue of Studia UBB. Sociologia, 2013
Research Interests:
The 2015 refugee crisis, and the ensuing policy debates towards a common European migration policy have held the attention of Romanian news media as well, as one of the most challenging issues for the European Union in the last decade.... more
The 2015 refugee crisis, and the ensuing policy debates towards a common European migration policy have held the attention of Romanian news media as well, as one of the most challenging issues for the European Union in the last decade. Even though Romania is not situated directly on the main routes on which refugees arrive to European countries, the issue was highly salient for both the news media and the public. In this case, the role of the media is even more important, as the main interface through which the public comes into contact with the related issues.
The present research focuses on (1) how the European Union and the member states were pictured by media related to the refugee crisis and the EU refugee and migration politics in the time frame: April 2015- December 2018 and (2) on mediated public diplomacy of the European Commission and of the European Council.
The present research focuses on (1) how the European Union and the member states were pictured by media related to the refugee crisis and the EU refugee and migration politics in the time frame: April 2015- December 2018 and (2) on mediated public diplomacy of the European Commission and of the European Council.