Reflecting on the challenges facing gender activists and researchers in Hungary, Dorottya Rédai outlines how interactions between researchers and activists could be more productive and why taking a transnational perspective is increasingly important.

As a gender scholar and activist, I have always tried to balance my activities and support one field of my work with knowledge and experiences from the other, splitting my time between academia and the NGO/CSO sphere. I have never actually found this binary quite meaningful for my own work. However, as remaining in academia has become untenable for me, I find myself investing my full working capacities in activism.

This happened in Hungary, a country where gender studies masters programmes were banned in 2018 and research and teaching positions even loosely related to gender studies are hardly available. Moreover, beyond academia there has been a wide-ranging legal and political attack against LGBTQ+ people launched by the ruling far-right government since 2020.

Transnational perspectives draw out commonalities in such anti-gender, anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-democratic politics across different national contexts and are currently receiving significant scholarly attention. They are crucial for developing an understanding of how these politics work and their impacts, but at the same time present challenges for analysing local political contexts.

it is more important than ever to go beyond the activist/academic binary and seek substantial collaboration

In Hungary, anti-LGBTQ+ political attacks are the strongest and most open part of an anti-gender politics that props up the regime. Having no significant parliamentary opposition has positioned LGBTQ+ organisations as almost the only functioning opposition to the ruling party. Finding myself directly involved in this struggle as an activist at Labrisz Lesbian Association and simultaneously giving up (or at least suspending) active engagement with academia, I have been thinking about how the two could better collaborate and how this fits into a transnational political context.

Firstly, it is more important than ever to go beyond the activist/academic binary and seek substantial collaboration, to do theory-informed activism and activism-informed scholarship in parallel. In fact, in countries and regions where the institutionalisation level of gender studies is none or low, it is quite common that feminist and queer activists have some academic background in gender studies, but it is less common that academics in gender studies do activism, as well. I share some suggestions for better cooperation. These are idealist suggestions, and I am aware of the complexity of the issues, but constructive conversations have to start somewhere.

Speaking a common language

Building linguistic bridges between activist and academic lingo would be important not only so that academics and activists understand each other better, but also for the so-called ‘general public’. Many people find both academic and activist language too abstract and irrelevant for their daily life. Populists know how to talk to people’s concerns and fears. The critical analysis of popular discourses should not only be a methodological tool, but also a pro-active technology. Discourses and narratives can be influenced by activists who can be supported by academics who work on critical discourse analysis.

Many people find both academic and activist language too abstract and irrelevant for their daily life.

Besides sharing a common language, academics could support activists in working critically with concepts. In my view, activists often use concepts understood to be universal, and this can lead to speaking in ways that don’t resonate within a local context. Conceptualising what we are doing, why, how, and with what aim can be a challenge if few people are comfortable working with and adapting theory and concepts in an organisation.

Working across academia and activism

Activists could be given more voice and more roles in academia. Activists can be invited into social science research projects as experts and on-the-ground consultants. No, I don’t mean the most recent practice in EC-funded research consortia where activists are invited into consultation boards for free. I mean decent expert fees, because activists are very knowledgeable, very busy and very badly paid people. At least in my country.

Inclusive publishing

Publication standards could be changed towards being more activist-friendly; acceptable genres and ways of writing should be diversified. To mention a personal example, I was very happy when I read the call for papers for a special issue of the Journal of Lesbian Studies, because it invited authors to write in a diverse range of genres. It’s not that I couldn’t have written an academic paper, it’s just that I didn’t want to. And although there were some mild attempts by the reviewers to “academise” my activist essay, in the end it remained and was published as an activist essay in the special issue. More such initiatives would be welcome.

Useful data

People like and understand numbers. Reliable quantified research data can make people reflect about their own standing in connection with a given social issue. Therefore, activists need data. Some CSO-s are large, funded and staffed well enough to produce data on the issues they work on, but smaller organisations are unable to do so. Activists need data which they can understand and use in a way that their target groups and the broader public also understand them (by the way, journalists also need such data). Activists also need data which gives them feedback about the work they do, the impact they have made. Activists know what kind of data they need, they often have brilliant ideas about what should be researched. It would be a very fruitful kind of collaboration if researchers and activists on a given field could consult each other about what to research and what kinds of data to produce.

Collaboration for transnational funding

Last, but not least, resistance has to be transnationally funded, because funding is not available for critical research and activism in countries where the regime is actively trying to suppress both (like in Hungary), so it is arguably most needed. Activists and academics usually have their own transnational networks through which they seek funding for their work. These do not overlap in most cases, but I can imagine co-funded transnational projects where activists and academics jointly work on dismantling anti-gender forces.

Activists and academics usually have their own transnational networks through which they seek funding for their work. These do not overlap in most cases

In countries where gender studies are banned and hostility against LGBTQ+ people and organisations is at the core of national-level politics, academic research on and resistance to anti-gender politics has to be transnational. Because anti-gender networks are also transnational, and politicians borrow ideas from each other. Even if transnational support for resistance triggers more immediate political hostility.

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