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In response to the economic crisis in 2009, the Hungarian government reduced the level of support for the employment of impaired people. The withdrawal of this state support has not only resulted in a massive wave of dismissals, but has also transformed some peripheral settlements into spaces of resistance. The research presented in this paper was conducted to understand the nature of political actions organised in Békés County (one of Hungary's disadvantaged regions) in order to support the social employment of impaired people. By analysing these political actions we have highlighted certain contradictions of applying the concept of identity politics in a post-socialist context, and the advantages of a combined, biosocial model. On the one hand, the outline of the political and economic situation helped us understand that the analysed social protests only resembled identity politics. In reality, they may even have contributed to the reproduction of ableism. On the other hand, by integrating individual experiences into the social model of disability we could also reveal that according to our impaired interviewees, it is not only their impairments and / or disabilities that render daily life difficult. Their ?rm call for changes in both economic and regional policy suggests that the deliberate and combined use of identity and class politics would be particularly important. Overall, our results suggest that it is essential for scholars in Hungary to engage more strongly in critical disability geography and to thus help the approach take root and develop further.

This paper aims at expanding the scope of the dominantly pragmatic, local scale-oriented smart village scholarship towards a perspective that recognizes that smart village development is a multiscalar political process. To show the necessity of this move, the shaping of smart village policies and practices in Hungary is examined through a qualitative lens. As the authors argue, path-dependent structural obstacles and interscalar relations undermine the prospects of smart village building in the sense of bottom-up integrated rural development, and there is a risk of a bias towards technological innovation. This exploratory article, using Hungary as a case study, argues that smart village scholarship should draw on the results of critical smart city scholarship to acquire in-depth understanding of current debates regarding potential smart village developments.

Critical analysis of existing urban policy programmes and discourses in Budapest, Hungary. Includes overview of political systems and governance structures, key shifts in national discourses, and approaches to policy over migration, citizenship, and diversity.

The migration of health workers is a global phenomenon with considerable impact on health care systems, which issue became a policy concern in Hungary after the Eastern Enlargement of the European Union in 2000s and early 2010s. The main aim of this paper is to reveal the migration intentions and motives of Hungarian medical students and health professionals.