Eva Zsuzsanna Katona
Current Project


Eva Zsuzsanna Katona

Curriculum Vitae

Current Project
My Phd project bears the working title: Coping with the stalemate: Networks, negotiations, and practical learning of equality and difference in select multi-ethnic NGOs and NGO - government encounters in public policy processes within Green line Israel.

Although equality may seem a straightforward matter within the notion of citizenship as a bundle of rights configuring state-society-people relations, it can not only be influenced by conflicting approaches to what Soysal called 'incorporation regimes' depending on different national, ethnic or gender groups, in fact it also means different things to different people. From an anthropological perspective, it is important to recognize the multiple understandings of this notion among human beings embedded in multiple roles and group affiliations in given state frameworks. It is even more important to account for the complex but also fuzzy nature of the notion 'improving' or 'approximating equality' not only in the Middle East but also the larger international context as well. The notion of 'equality' recognized in its absence, most often conceptualized and generally worded normative concept or a legal term or as a goal to be approximated in the future to which actions and policies in the present may be geared to, as well as duties and obligations. These are linked to notions of 1st, 2nd, and 3rd generations of civic, political and social rights that are configuring state-peoples relations, which are marked by growing international consensus, however notoriously weak enforcement mechanisms, and with the second and third generation of rights, massive debates and robust dilemmas. This is coupled with highly uneven practice and respect of these rights whose trajectory was geared to specific historical moments and context that mark the post-war (post-WWI and post-WWII) incorporations of groups into new states, the civil rights struggle in the U.S., the indigenous movements, and the renegotiation of group incorporation terms in post 1989 multi-ethnic 'transition' countries in Central and Eastern Europe.  And  last  but  not  least  the
conceptualization of equality in its absence has been linked to the emergence of the modern state itself, and in particular to that of the nation state.

Given these robust dilemmas and variations, the specific historical circumstances of the conflict ridden separate incorporation of some of the groups as citizens of Israel, the documented continued disparities, yet the hold of the notion of equality in certain public debates, and on the other hand the daily realities of the duality of separation but also interaction between members of different ethnic and religious groups, I propose in my research the empirical examination of this notion (treated as an empty concept) as deployed and shaped by the practice and context of specific NGOs of mixed ethnic membership (all citizens of Israel) within present day Israel  inside the  so-called  Green  or '49
Read: Men's rights in the family
(location: Tel aviv-Yafo)
armistice line. I focus upon ethnically mixed organizations that choose to operationalise equality as a pragmatic and/or rhetorical concept for lobbying/influencing and/or countering governmental policymaking for a diverse and divisive public and that through this activity also create spaces for interaction and learning for members of otherwise structurally separated groups. I will focus on how these groupings fill in with meaning, understand, embody, practice, negotiate and reinterpret this notion through their public policy lobbying and other activities in the medium of a public sphere they both shape and are shaped by. In brief, I will research what it means today in Israel to do such work with such a notion, how it works, and what functions it may serve to what effect.

The visual component of my research focuses on how they employ the visual medium (film, photographs, or other) for this purpose and I myself may use the visual medium for presenting a visual theory of this process and its embedded-ness in the current context. Audio-visual anthropology is crucial for approaching the visible and invisible as well as multi-layered and ambiguous aspects of 'notion X' as in negotiations and actions but also in the larger context and social field.