Jonathan McCombs

The research I will undertake at Central European University’s Institute for Advanced Study is the completion of my book project, tentatively titled Whiteness as Post-Socialist Property: Racial Liberalism and Property Transformation in Budapest’s Eighth District. The book argues that anti-Roma racism in Hungary, conceived here as a systemic and institutionalized power relation, is perpetuated by social hierarchies grounded in the legal framework of private property. To this end, it seeks to bring into conversation insights from settler colonial and post-colonial theory on the centrality of private property in perpetuating racial hierarchies with the ostensibly non-colonial context of East Europe. This project aims to investigate these entanglements in Budapest’s Eighth District, a neighborhood with a longstanding Roma community. In doing so, the book situates the enduring, and seemingly intractable, issue of systemic and institutional anti-Roma racism within a broader global context.