The 'geographical imaginary' centred on the physical landscape of the Carpathian basin, and the formulation of national-populist trends

This project will investigate the role of geographical imaginations (GIs) and spatial imaginaries in constructing and (re-)producing Hungary's geopolitical culture, and thus the role social, political, cultural, and intellectual elites play in the legitimation and performance of these imaginaries. This aims to uncover the shifting scales of imaginaries, from the personal and embodied, to the societal and national, and back again, to reveal the power relations associating with these GIs. Understanding these GIs as highly situated, this project is additionally interested in regional and EU responses to and implications of such narratives in Hungarian governance.

In-depth interviews with elites will highlight the ways in which personal and embodied imaginations of the Hungarian state are projected into their work and professional beliefs, and vice versa. Ethnographic studies of cultural and political sites will additionally be collected to understand how GIs are articulated and legitimised in everyday spaces. To further understand how GIs are internalised, focus groups with University students will be conducted.

These elites will be predominantly accessed in Budapest, but I will also visit other major cities in Hungary to account for regional differences. This project will additionally visit Bratislava, Slovakia, and Brussels, Belgium, with both sites playing a key, through contrasting, role in understanding the ways in which Hungarian GIs are influencing the wider region. By visiting both, one with a friendly geopolitical relationship with Hungary (Slovakia) and the other with increasingly hostile relationship (the EU), the spatialities of Hungarian GIs, especially the inclusion and exclusion criteria, can be better understood, as well as a deeper understanding of the increasingly fragmented geopolitical positioning of the EU.