The British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship is a three-year award made to an annual cohort of outstanding early career researchers in the humanities or social sciences wishing to pursue an independent research project, towards the completion of a significant piece of publishable research.
Anna will spend the next three years on her research project ‘Digital Ex/Inclusion and Hungarian LGBTQ+ citizens: Rebels and exiles on social media’.
This project examines social media use among LGBTQ+ citizens in Hungary where LGBTQ+ minorities have been gradually stripped of their rights since the rise of illiberalism in 2010, resulting in either intensifying domestic activism or exile to the West.
By using life story interviews and digital ethnography, this project investigates LGBTQ+s’ digital media usage in the changing Hungarian political environment, offering original contributions to communication, media, gender, LGBTQ+ studies, and political science. While much-existing research on digital media and LGBTQ+ communities focuses on digital media’s role as a safe haven and means of expression among LGBTQ+ people in liberal democracies, considerably less is known about the situation of LGBTQ+ communities in illiberal countries, such as Hungary.
This project aims to fill this gap by paying specific attention to social media’s role in the lives of both those who left the country and those who are actively involved in activism.