Distant Bodies, Distant Lands – Hungarian State Socialist Female Expert Experiences in the Global South 1960s–1980s

• Applicant: Dr. Réka Krizmanics
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 508880802

The project investigates the epistemic framework as well as the practical processes surrounding the delegation of Hungarian woman experts (food engineering, medical expertise, hydrology) for years-long missions in select countries of the Global South in the period spanning from the 1960s until the end of state socialism in Hungary. My primary interest lies in the sensitive construction of a hitherto unprecedented intersectional framework that considers gender, state socialism, race and class as an integrated analytical backdrop against which I read the specific woman experts’ experiences. Second, I argue that these experiences were shaped by transcultural encounters and partisanship and I will explore how they affected the language and the state socialist imaginary about the Global South in Hungary, thus, I will locate a distinctly female agency in these processes. The context of the Second World’s growing involvement in the Global South offers a fertile ground for an intersectional analysis, centered on woman experts. In the course of the 1960s–1980s, within the framework of transsystemic international cooperation or bilateral agreements, similarly to other state socialist regimes, thousands of experts were deployed from Hungary to get involved in the creation or maintenance of vital infrastructures such as transportation, agriculture, health care, etc. Women experts of various professional backgrounds and class belonging (ranging from skilled workers to leading researchers) also participated in these missions, relocated with their families and spent several years in situ. I will focus on their experiences, relying on a diverse set of sources: ego-documents, documentations of different state organs involved in the facilitation of expert missions, reports that experts submitted upon their return, and the coverage of their activities in Hungarian press. I will set the foundation for the intersectional analysis with the above-mentioned sources and their prosopographical profile that will enable me to reflect on how female experts were affected by social mobility and to what extent can their geographical mobility be connected to their social background. My investigation will shed light on various female perceptions of ‘otherness’ at the sites of expert mission and will compare the narration of these encounters in ego-documents and official documents. The official documents that informed the preparation processes of successive generations of experts to be dispatched may be further exploited for the purpose of seeing how official bodies incorporated or neglected the female accounts and whether there were attempts at creating different preparatory materials for male and female candidates.

• DFG Programme: WBP Position