The academic program of the research group focuses on issues that are both topical and essential from the aspect of Hungarian society and ethnology. Based on our former research findings, it concentrates on the previously designated geographical area (traditional settlement forms selected in the old counties of Abaúj, Gömör, Zemplén, Szabolcs, Szatmár, Bereg, Ung, Ugocsa and Bihar), which constitutes a contact zone between western and eastern Christianity, including ethnic groups, nations and cultural regions.
In this grant application cycle, the research group conducts present-oriented basic research projects, which are based on a systematically explored historical background. The cultural patterns of the issues of cultural adaptation and social integration, cultural heritage and patrimonization, and migration and poverty/pauperization make up the central concerns in its problem-centered scope of interest. It highlights the ethnographical-anthropological research of significant contemporary social problems by investigating the cultural and social situation of families residing in disadvantaged micro-regions (e.g., family structure, lifestyle, strategies of survival and mobility, pauperization) and the related topics connected to migration (e.g., immigration alongside the state border and social migration directed to individual farmsteads).
The program of our research group is basic research. Its topic is twofold. On the one hand, it is a direct continuation of the academic work completed between 2012 and 2017, which covered the ethnographical-anthropological examination of the interrelations between the challenges affecting 20th-century modernization and the local society of the present as well as the globalization processes at the beginning of the 21st century and cultural adaptation processes. On the other hand, a priority research topic is the investigation of the socio-cultural phenomena that most powerfully influence contemporary Hungarian society, including an inquiry into the everyday customs of disadvantaged children and families and the scrutiny aimed at migration-related phenomena occurring in the Carpathian Basin.
Research group members regularly contribute to the teaching activities taking place at the Department of Ethnography. They have a certain specific number of classes to teach in the curriculum scheduled for the BA and MA programs. They also coordinate the fieldwork of students and assist in the implementation of empirical research projects. Their academic findings and results are normally presented by the members of the research group to the students in the form of classroom lectures and seminars.