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Between the Sociologist and the Secret Police: The Ethical Affordances of a Cold War Archive
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The 2026 Collective Social Futures Seminar Series got underway on 13 January with a presentation from Professor James Kapaló, Study of Religions Department, School of Society, Politics and Ethics.
Seminar Details
Based on research in the private archive of Zsuzsa Horváth (1950-1995), a sociologist who worked in 1970s and 80s Hungary, in this presentation Professor Kapaló explored what it meant to research the extremely sensitive topic of new religious movements whilst under surveillance by the secret police. Horváth, in the course of her research and her interactions with her research participants, collected and was gifted elements of the ephemera of religious life in the form of images, objects, publications, postcards and leaflets. The context, affordances and connectivities of these material religious items in her collection reveal much about her research methods, care for her participants, the ethical challenges she faced and her moral choices, that could not be expressed directly in her publications. Professor Kapaló argued that the scholarly archive of Zsuzsa Horváth, whilst offering us valuable access to aspects of the sensorial and aesthetic worlds of religious communities she studied, also reveals the complex ethical and methodological entanglements of the sociologist of religion working under a repressive regime. This case study also represents a rare glimpse into the genealogy of trust-based research ethics decades before institutional ethics review became the norm.
The seminar was chaired by Professor Maggie O'Neill, Director of Collective Social Futures and ISS21.