Eva Tessza Udvarhelyi
Eva Tessza Udvarhelyi is a doctoral candidate in environmental psychology at the CUNY Graduate Center. She has an MA in cultural anthropology from ELTE University in Budapest where she researched the exclusion of homeless people from public spaces. At CUNY, she got an MA in Psychology with a thesis that focused on the Critical Mass movement in Budapest as a form of embodied democratic practice. In 2009 Udvarhelyi co-founded a group called The City is for All, which is the only homeless-led advocacy organization in Hungary. Udvarhelyi’s dissertation is about the criminalization of homelessness and the potential for homeless people to resist it.
Collected Work
“‘If We Don’t Push Homeless People Out, We Will End Up Being Pushed Out by Them’: The Criminalization of Homelessness as State Strategy in Hungary”
In recent years, the intensity of the criminalization of homelessness in Hungary gave rise to a veritable tug-of-war between the ruling party and grassroots activists. In fact, today it is the only country in the world where the possibility of penalizing homelessness is encoded in the constitution itself. In this paper, I first provide an overview of the rise of homelessness since the late 1980s. Then, I go on to examine changing public and political attitudes towards homelessness in post-socialist Hungary and place the growing trend towards penalization in the larger context of an emerging criminal paradigm. After examining the recent authoritarian turn, I argue that the radical intensification of criminalization is a strategy not only to secure political dominance, but also to obscure the failure of the state to address the social, political and economic contradictions that became salient at the time of the regime change.