Feb 21: Public Lecture: András Bozóki – Human Rights Movements in Eastern Europe
11 February 2011
Students and Alumni Secure Positions With Financial Times Publications
15 February 2011

Feb 18: JMSC Seminar: András Bozóki – European Politics, Media and the Public Sphere

András Bozóki, Professor of Political Science at the Central European University and former Minister of Culture in Hungary, will host a media research seminar at the JMSC about European Politics, Media and the Public Sphere on Friday, February 18, 2011.

András Bozóki

The seminar:
Since its inception, the European Union has been struggling with a democratic deficit. The EU is composed of democratic countries, but it is governed by a group of technocrats who are nominated by their respective countries.

Bozóki will address some of the following questions: What are the tools to enhance the democratic legitimacy of the European Union? What is the role of the media in creating a European public sphere? Is the European public sphere an illusion or a reality? What is the role of the EU in the North African “Twitter revolutions”? How does the European Union maintain basic rights in relation to the controversial, authoritarian media law of the member state Hungary? How are European identities formed in these political conflicts?

All these questions will be discussed in the context of ongoing comparative research on the European public sphere (called Eurosphere), which brought together research groups from 16 European universities. Bozóki is one of the leaders of this international academic enterprise.

The speaker:
András Bozóki is Professor of Political Science at the Central European University (CEU) in Budapest, Hungary. Prior to this, he was visiting professor at Columbia University in New York and at Bologna University. He has also taught at Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary, at Smith College and Mount Holyoke College in the US and at Nottingham University in Britain.

He served as President of the Hungarian Political Science Association and as Minister of Culture in the socialist-liberal coalition government of Hungary from 2005-2006.

His research interests include comparative politics (post-communist democratisation, East Central European politics and the European Union), and theories of political change. He has published and edited more than 40 books.

Bozóki has been a research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study (Wissenschaftskolleg) in Berlin, Germany; the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (NIAS) in Wassenaar; the Sussex Institute for European Studies in Brighton, UK; the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, Austria, and at the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA). He was a Jean Monnet Fellow at the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence, Italy.

Date: Friday, February 18, 2011
Time: 12-1 pm
Venue: Shum Wai Yau Reading Room, Eliot Hall, The University of Hong Kong