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W przyszłą środę (9 października) na Wydziale Socjologii będzie gościć dr Ágnes Erőss HUN-REN CSFK Geographical Institute, Budapest, która wygłosi wykład pt: War induced population dynamics in the Ukrainian-Hungarian border region.

Wykład odbędzie się o godzinie 11:30 w sali 108 a.



Abstrakt
Before February 2022, approximately 130,000 ethnic Hungarians resided in Ukraine's westernmost region, Transcarpathia, forming a fairly compact ethnic settlement along the Hungarian border. This well-organized community developed full-scale educational, cultural and religious institutions, relying on their kin-state's support.
In an already mobile region, where – after the annexation of Crimea and the beginning of the war in Donbas – the competing migration policies of neighbouring countries have been draining the labour force, local Hungarians' migration strategies were mainly influenced by Hungary's kin-state politics, especially the implementation of the non-residential citizenship in 2011. The outbreak of war in 2022 induced dramatic changes in the region, including (e)migration. Estimates suggest that tens of thousands of Hungarians left Transcarpathia, primarily the men liable for military service, but entire families have also emigrated. The majority of those who left settled in Hungary as Hungarian citizens, or moved to western EU countries. In parallel, hundreds of thousands of IDPs from the war effected regions found refuge in Transcarpathia.
This paper intends to explore (1) the migration patterns of Transcarpathian Hungarians; (2) the impact of war induced population move on the ethnic, social and demographic structure of the Hungarian-Ukrainian borderland; and (3) the gender aspect of (im)mobility in the studied border region.
Our field research confirmed that economically unattractive rural settings face depopulation in Transcarpathia, while in Hungary the villages close to the border receive new population. In urban areas the proportion of Hungarians has fallen, while the settlement of IDPs concentrates there. Due to the selective migration, the demographic and social composition of the resident population in Transcarpathia, including the Hungarian minority, has distorted. In parallel, the northeastern region of Hungary bordering Ukraine, which is otherwise a periphery, has developed as a meeting point between labour migrants work in the West/Hungary and their family members, who have remained on the Ukrainian side of the border.


Ágnes Erőss is a research fellow at the HUN-REN Geographical Institute Research Centre for Astronomy and Earth Sciences in Budapest, Hungary. Her PhD research investigated the spatial representation of memory and commemoration, particularly the politics of heritage in the ethnically and culturally diverse Central and Eastern Europe. Additionally, she investigates the development of family and individual livelihood strategies in the context of transnational migration and kin-state politics in the region. She is particularly interested in understanding the gender aspect of (im)mobility in Transcarpathia, Western Ukraine. She co-directed two documentary films on the impact of transnational migration on gender relations (Those who stay: left behind women in Transcarpathia, 2021) and multiethnicity (Lenin was not needed anymore, 2019) in Western Ukraine.