- Email:
- jestorey@iu.edu
- Department:
- Department of Anthropology, REEI
- Campus:
- IU Bloomington
Education
Ph.D., Indiana University Bloomington (Central Eurasian Studies), 2022
M.A., Indiana University Bloomington (Central Eurasian Studies), 2015
B.A., University of Colorado at Boulder (Anthropology), 2007
Geographical Areas of Specialization
Central and Eastern Europe, especially Hungary
Research Interests
I am a linguistic and political anthropologist who studies political discourse in Hungary, Eastern Europe, and the European Union. Broadly, I am interested in multimodal political communication, talk about conflict and war, disinformation, semiotics, nationalism, and how political talk affects notions of identity and belonging.
Political discourse in both public and private spheres, mediated and in face-to-face talk, helps to shape policy and our political reality. My interdisciplinary research addresses the discourse of authoritarianism in public and private spaces in Hungary, where citizens assign meaning to otherwise ambiguous political texts. I investigated Viktor Orbán’s political rhetoric in 2019 and 2020, when I conducted ethnographic research on Hungarian national identity as a Fulbright-Hays Research Fellow in Budapest. I found that many of Orbán’s utterances, offered to Hungarian citizens as “truths,” live on in their own speech, but likely not as he intended. These utterances – texts – are words and phrases that are the building blocks of culture and help structure the way humans perceive the world around them. In Hungary, citizens often voiced confused, contradictory descriptions of political reality. Some expressed descriptions of political worlds that were foundationally xenophobic, fueled by the party in power’s discourse. The insights I gain by tracing the circulation of political texts in Hungarian media and in face-to-face talk contributes to literature in European and Hungarian studies, political science, and linguistic and political anthropology that investigates discourse as part of the political structure of states. My findings speak not only to what is happening in Hungary, but to the authoritarian turn in the Western world and to disinformation studies writ large.
Recent Courses Taught
- Pro-seminar in Russian and East European Area Studies (graduate level)
- Anthropology of War and Conflict in East Europe
- Disinformation and the State in East Europe
- Current Issues and Conflict in Eastern Europe
- Nation and Governance in Hungary
- Introduction to Hungary, Estonia, and Finland (co-instructor)
Publication Highlights
“Disinformation, Ideas without Borders, and the War in Ukraine.” Hungarian Studies Review 49 (2): 220–223. 2022
“Hungary and Ukraine: Relations Between States, States between Relations.” Hungarian Studies Review 49(2): 201–204. [As roundtable editor and organizer.] 2022
“Creating Truths in Orbán’s Hungary,” Anthropology News 62.6, 20 December 2021.