Blaming Eastern Europe: The story of a grant bid for research into East-West movements of popular media, people and ideas
TFTV/109, School of Arts and Creative Technologies East, Campus East, University of York (Map)
Event details
It has become a commonplace, in journalistic think pieces and policy papers alike, that Trump’s second presidency has adopted Hungary PM Viktor Orbán’s rule book for a partisan takeover of public institutions to remove robust checks and balances from illiberal practices of power (see e.g. Austin 2025; Jones 2025; Klein 2025; Stelter 2025; Shapiro and Végh 2024). These analyses reduce multiply entangled historical, financial, ideological and cultural ties to false but convenient simplicity, namely that where the prime minister of one of the less consequential EU states has led, the president of the most powerful state of our times has followed.
Our research is part of emerging efforts by Eastern European migrant scholars (Iván Kalmár 2024; József Böröcz 2021; Manuela Boatcă 2020, 2021; Łukasz Szulc 2022; Aleksandra Levicki 2023) to challenge such simplistic readings of East-West relations, by examining the role screen culture plays in perpetuating this narrative. Drawing on such world systems analyses, we argue that the narrative of the Orbánization of America exculpates US practitioners of illiberal politics. It mobilizes the xenophobic fear of a flow of toxic ideas putatively forged in a politically less mature Eastern Europe towards a once open and pluralistic West now fatally at risk of authoritarianism. Our claim is that the transnational circulation of popular screen discourses of nation, race and gender can reveal the interconnectedness and circularity of the movement of ideas and ideologies. For this reason our research seeks to encompass a wide historical period since the late Cold War to the present. It applies critical transnationalism and de-westernizing methods by centring Hungary’s state-funded popular media culture alongside market-financed Anglophone cinema and television programming widely distributed in Hungary, much of which is produced in Hungary’s service production centres. This dual focus on globally distributed Anglophone popular media alongside Hungarian and Hungary-produced film and television culture enables us to explore the financial, ideological and cultural entanglements of US and Hungarian practices of representation and discourses of power, community and identity, race and gender.
Our talk not only sets out these contexts and research aims of our project, but also tells the story of failed attempts to secure funding from the AHRC. We call for collaboration, and sketch ways forward and tentative plans to secure the support of the reviewers at the next time of asking. We will benefit greatly from your questions, and, perhaps even more so than your questions, from your comments.
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About the speakers
Gábor Gergely and Júlia Havas
Gábor Gergely (he/him) is associate professor of film at the University of Lincoln. He has published books on foreign stardom (2012, 2022), European cinemas (2022) and Jewishness and racial nationalism in Hungary (2017). He has collaborated with Júlia Havas on several grant bids and publications. He is chair of the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies.
Júlia Havas (she/her) is Senior Lecturer in Film and Television at the University of York. She is the author of Woman Up: Invoking Feminism in Quality Television (Wayne State UP 2022). She has published on Anglo-American television, the gender and race politics of popular media, streaming culture, Eastern European film and TV, and the transcultural travel of media in the journals Television and New Media, MAI, VIEW, Animation Studies, Celebrity Studies and various edited collections.
Venue details
Wheelchair accessible