Zsolt has his PhD from Central European University in Vienna and has previously worked at UiT – The Arctic University of Norway.His work at UiT is in the Good Integration (GOODINT) project funded by the Norwegian Research Council about integration of immigrants. His research there is focused on the connection between democracy and integration, such as democratic inclusion, voting rights for immigrants and how much attention one should pay to anti-immigrant backlash.
Zsolt was interested in the GOODATTENTION group due to his previous interest in agenda setting in the public discourse. This led him to the question of how we pay attention -and attention norms. This relates to his previous work at UiT. One example is how the media widely focuses on immigrant crime, but less so on the failure of the integration of, and prejudice and discrimination against immigrants. But similar problems arise in different areas as well.
Think of recent debates on AI. As ChatGPT gained public attention, questions of
regulating AI came to the fore, but the narrative quickly focused on AI risk, including
existential risk, rather than the much more short-term and less speculative problems of AI’s impact on intellectual property rights, media, education, and the like.
These examples raise the question of what we as the democratic public should focus on. This is not a question of post-truth politics, fake news, or propaganda; the problem is not necessarily that the stories we are told are false or misleading. The problem is that out of the many true and important stories and issues out there, we may not be paying attention to what we should.
Here attentions norms become extremely important. At the GOODATTENTION project Zsolt will work on the topics of political philosophy and democratic theory. He is looking forward to tapping into the expertise the group already has and utilize this for a fruitful interplay between the philosophy of attention and political philosophy. Relevant topics include attentional capture, the control of our attention, and adequate attentional responses in democratic politics. What is the condition for having appropriate control over our attention in the public sphere? What tends to capture it? How should the individual citizen start to think about their own attentional habits, and what institutional solutions can promote good attention for a healthy and well-functioning democracy?
This ties into the fundamental questions of what democracy is and what it should mean.
Zsolt has lived in Norway with his family since 2022. When he is not philosophizing, he enjoys hikes in nature, reading non-fiction and the occasional work of poetry.