D Sik
Biographic Data
| ID | 7391 |
|---|---|
| NAME | D Sik |
| GIVEN NAMES | D |
| FAMILY NAME | Sik |
| SIGNATURE | SIK D |
| AFFILIATIONS | Eötvös Loránd University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0567-4587 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 29 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 13 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 29 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2015 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Post-democratic discursive hegemony – a natural language processing-based analysis of Hungarian parliamentary discourses between 1998-2020
The parliament, as a key component of the public sphere, is both a reflection of and a stage for the post-democratic transition. Our study examines Hungarian parliamentary discourse as an indicator of a transition in which democratic institutions persist yet become hollow and are repurposed for charismatic legitimacy. Using natural language processing, we analyse a corpus of all parliamentary speeches from 1998 to 2020, employing keyness analysis…
De-Democratizing the Public Sphere – A Structural Topic Model Analysis of Hungarian Parliamentary Discourses Between 1998-2020
Since 2010, Hungary has become a prime example of democratic backsliding. Our research analyzed this process based on Habermas’s theory. We selected a corpus of parliamentary debates from 1998 to 2020. Our chosen method, structural topic modeling identifies thematic clusters and communicative patterns. We explore the communicative rationality potential of the parliamentary public sphere along its potential for deliberative control over nepotist, …
Beyond guilt and responsibility – The social phenomenology of late modern debt experience
The article describes the late modern experience of debt by combining phenomenological and social theoretical analyses. From Nietzsche's perspective, the lived experience of indebtedness is explained by guilt. From the perspectives of Levinas and Derrida, the debt experience is explained by the impossible moralities of ‘absolute responsibility’ and ‘unconditional hospitality.’ These moral phenomenologies are connected to anthropologies of gift an…
The ‘Inevitability’ and ‘Impossibility’ of Compassion – Combining Transcendental and Social Phenomenology
Compassion is a fundamental component of social existence. However, in late modernity, several structural transformations undermine it. This article analyzes the paradox contemporary constellation characterized by the ‘inevitability’ and ‘impossibility’ of compassion. First, the general components of compassion – corporeal proximity (Zahavi), interaffective responsiveness (Rosan), and responsibility (Levinas) – are examined from a transcendental …
Socialized into depression – toward a social phenomenological psychopathology
The article aims at expanding the horizon of phenomenological psychopathology of depression from a social theoretical perspective. Based on Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological ontology, in the first section, depression is reinterpreted as a disruption of chiasm: it is not merely the illness of the body, the disorder of the mind, or a specific form of social suffering, but the interrelated distortion of time consciousness, agency, and interaffectivit…
Between Depression and Alienation: Burnout as a Translator Category for Critical Theories
The horizon of critical theories and their target audience (i.e., the subjects exposed to social suffering) have drifted apart. While the former relies on its own set of diagnostic concepts (e.g., alienation), the actors are socialized within the frames of biomedical discourses. This creates a rupture between theory and praxis: the concepts of social suffering fail to orient collective action. To overcome this challenge, a translator category is …
Structural Deprivation, Rural Segregation, and Substance Use—A Hungarian Case Study
New designer drugs are a major public health concern, particularly in disadvantaged, segregated communities. While the phenomenon is better understood in urban settings, it remains unexplored in rural areas. This gap explains our research rationale: an interdisciplinary survey was designed; the fieldwork took place in Hungary, in a segregated rural area ( n = 425), in 2022. The complex sociological-psychological-existential trap represented by ru…
Critique and consolation: Countering 'activist fatigue' in a non-therapeutic way
Contemporary emancipatory praxis is undermined by 'activist fatigue' related to the uncertain efficiency of collective action. The article investigates the phenomenon from a critical theoretical perspective. The crisis of praxis is inseparable from the crisis of theory: to resolve them, critical theory's relation to suffering needs to be revised. To provide an alternative framework, the perspective of consolation is proposed as a counter to activ…
Depression in times of a pandemic – the impact of Covid-19 on the lay discourses of e-mental health communities
The article aims at exploring the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the lay discourses of depression emerging in online mental health forums. The narrative framing of depression plays a central role not only because it affects the instrumental strategies of depressed people (e.g., preferred therapy), but also because it is a constitutive element of the identity of depressed people, thus affects the process of recovery itself. COVID-19 had a seri…
Rigid Flesh – Towards the Critique of Technologically Mediated Chiasm
Technology has been at the centre of existentialist (e.g. Heidegger) and sociological (e.g. Marcuse) critique for a long time. The latest versions of criticism rely on the results of "science and technology studies": they argue that essentialist conceptualisations of technology should be replaced while aiming at "democratizing technology" (e.g. Feenberg). However, even these approaches are characterised by a shortcoming when it comes to providing…
Distorted flesh – Towards a non-speculative concept of social pathology
The article aims at elaborating a non-speculative concept of social pathology. In the first section, various conceptualizations (e.g. Habermas, Honneth) are critically revaluated. It is argued that (a) applying the originally medical concept of ‘pathology’ on social entities has untenable connotations (due to the lacking social equivalent of death); (b) grounding social pathology on the level of ‘social suffering’ is not in accordance with the ac…
Justifying the paradoxes of modernity: On the emergence of contemporary cynical discourses
Late modern existence is built around ambivalences: subjects experience the structural paradoxes of global capitalism or information society as social suffering; yet they follow behaviour patterns reinforcing the unsustainable trajectories. The article explores the discourses justifying such structural paradoxes, while normalizing the related suffering. First, the pragmatic theory of justification (Boltanski, Thévenot) is reinterpreted from a mod…
From Scapegoating to the Culture of Cruelty: (Mis)Managing Mimetic Desire and Violence in Late Modernity
Due to the 'civilizing process' (Elias), the overall level of violence is decreasing; yet its transforming patterns persist. The article aims at examining the contemporary structures and mechanisms responsible for violence control, while also exploring the newly emerging, naturalized patterns of cruelty. Firstly, René Girard's mimetic theory is overviewed: while in archaic societies, mimetic crisis is controlled by sacrificial rites, modernizatio…
Empty satisfaction—a social phenomenology of late modern enjoyment
Phenomenological analyses of enjoyment are relatively rare; also, the few known attempts (e.g. Levinas) are elaborated in a transcendental fashion, without reflecting on the socio-historical constituents. The article aims at filling this gap by elaborating a social phenomenology of late modern enjoyment. Firstly, the experience is analysed with the help of general phenomenological descriptions: the visceral, existential and ethical constituents a…
Populist Juggling with Fear: The Case of Hungary
In this article, the interrelatedness of contemporary populism and fear is analysed. It is argued that contemporary populism is burdened with the uncertainties and contingencies of late modernity. Therefore, it is not capable of merely “instrumentalizing” fear (i.e., relying on fear as an instrument of ideological goals). Instead, populism is forced to “juggle” with fear in a continuously changing, unpredictable constellation. In the first sectio…
Towards a post-pandemic social contract
Social contract theories serve a twofold purpose: by addressing acute crises, they elaborate solutions to long-standing social paradoxes. The article reinterprets the stakes of the Covid pandemic from this perspective. Firstly, the long-lasting structural paradoxes of late modernity are linked to the acute crisis of the pandemic with the help of critical theories of late modernity. It is argued that the pandemic provides opportunity for revaluati…
Bio, psycho, or social: Supervised machine learning to classify discursive framing of depression in online health communities
Supervised machine learning on textual data has successful industrial/business applications, but it is an open question whether it can be utilized in social knowledge building outside the scope of hermeneutically more trivial cases. Combining sociology and data science raises several methodological and epistemological questions. In our study the discursive framing of depression is explored in online health communities. Three discursive frameworks…
Towards a post-pandemic social contract
Social contract theories serve a twofold purpose: by addressing acute crises, they elaborate solutions to long-standing social paradoxes. The article reinterprets the stakes of the Covid pandemic from this perspective. Firstly, the long-lasting structural paradoxes of late modernity are linked to the acute crisis of the pandemic with the help of critical theories of late modernity. It is argued that the pandemic provides opportunity for revaluati…
Power from indirect pain: A historical phenomenology of medical pain management
The article aims at reconstructing how pain is used in contemporary societies in the process of engraving power. Firstly, a social phenomenological analysis of pain is conducted: Husserl’s and Merleau-Ponty’s ideas are used for clarifying the experience of pain itself; Elaine Scarry’s analyses are overviewed in order to reconstruct how pain contributes to the establishing of power. Secondly, this complex approach is applied in early modern contex…
From Lay Depression Narratives to Secular Ritual Healing: An Online Ethnography of Mental Health Forums
The article aims at analysing online depression forums enabling lay reinterpretation and criticism of expert biomedical discourses. Firstly, two contrasting interpretations of depression are reconstructed: expert psy-discourses are confronted with the phenomenological descriptions of lay experiences, with a special emphasis on online forums as empirical platforms hosting such debates. After clarifying the general theoretical stakes concerning con…
The asymmetries of the biopsychosocial model of depression in lay discourses - Topic modelling online depression forums
Biomedical discourse is underrepresented in lay discussions, while psychological discourse plays an overall dominant role. Even if actors are initially aware of the social mechanisms contributing to depression, they neglect these factors when it comes to considering the countermeasures
From Naturalized Suffering to Futile Ownership-A Genealogy of the Depressed Lifeworld
While several separate researches focus on either the phenomenological description of depression, or on the modernization theoretical analysis of the structural transformations responsible for its emergence, the combination of both perspectives is still rare. The article aims at filling this gap by analysing modernization from the perspective of the phenomenological preconditions of depression. A depressed lifeworld is characterized by burdensome…
Machine Learning of Concepts Hard Even for Humans: The Case of Online Depression Forums
Social scientists of mixed-methods research have traditionally used human annotators to classify texts according to some predefined knowledge. The 'big data' revolution, the fast growth of digitized texts in recent years brings new opportunities but also new challenges. In our research project, we aim to examine the potential for natural language processing (NLP) techniques to understand the individual framing of depression in online forums. In t…
Towards a social theory of fear: A phenomenology of negative integration
Despite its undisputed importance, fear is yet to become a distinct research area for social theory. However, without a clear conceptualization of fear, the explanation of significant phenomena, such as the risk-related anxiety or the conflict of the global and the local, remains incomplete. This article aims at reintroducing fear at the fundamental level of social integration. First, the social contract theories of Hobbes and Rousseau are reinte…
Búcsú Csákó Mihálytól (1941–2019)
Machine Learning of Concepts Hard Even for Humans: The Case of Online Depression Forums
Social scientists of mixed-methods research have traditionally used human annotators to classify texts according to some predefined knowledge. The 'big data' revolution, the fast growth of digitized texts in recent years brings new opportunities but also new challenges. In our research project, we aim to examine the potential for natural language processing (NLP) techniques to understand the individual framing of depression in online forums. In t…
Towards a social theory of fear: A phenomenology of negative integration
Despite its undisputed importance, fear is yet to become a distinct research area for social theory. However, without a clear conceptualization of fear, the explanation of significant phenomena, such as the risk-related anxiety or the conflict of the global and the local, remains incomplete. This article aims at reintroducing fear at the fundamental level of social integration. First, the social contract theories of Hobbes and Rousseau are reinte…
From mental disorders to social suffering: Making sense of depression for critical theories
This article aims at grounding critical theories with the help of psy discourses. Even if the relationship between the two disciplines has always been a controversial one, the article argues that therapeutic knowledge that accesses empirical forms of social suffering may offer important insights for critical theory. This general argument is demonstrated by complementing the theories of Bourdieu and Habermas with a clinical description of depressi…
Distorted flesh – Towards a non-speculative concept of social pathology
The article aims at elaborating a non-speculative concept of social pathology. In the first section, various conceptualizations (e.g. Habermas, Honneth) are critically revaluated. It is argued that (a) applying the originally medical concept of ‘pathology’ on social entities has untenable connotations (due to the lacking social equivalent of death); (b) grounding social pathology on the level of ‘social suffering’ is not in accordance with the ac…
Populist Juggling with Fear: The Case of Hungary
In this article, the interrelatedness of contemporary populism and fear is analysed. It is argued that contemporary populism is burdened with the uncertainties and contingencies of late modernity. Therefore, it is not capable of merely “instrumentalizing” fear (i.e., relying on fear as an instrument of ideological goals). Instead, populism is forced to “juggle” with fear in a continuously changing, unpredictable constellation. In the first sectio…
Memory Transmission and Political Socialization in Post-Socialist Hungary
This article examines and critically evaluates the processes of institutional memory transmission and political formation in post-socialist Hungary utilizing the critical theories of Habermas, Giddens and Bourdieu. In the first part of the article, a discourse analysis of the public debates about two distinctive 'lieux de memoires' - the House of Terror and the Holocaust Memorial Center - is elaborated. The concept of 'memory vacuum' is introduce…
Memory Transmission and Political Socialization in Post-Socialist Hungary
This article examines and critically evaluates the processes of institutional memory transmission and political formation in post-socialist Hungary utilizing the critical theories of Habermas, Giddens and Bourdieu. In the first part of the article, a discourse analysis of the public debates about two distinctive 'lieux de memoires' - the House of Terror and the Holocaust Memorial Center - is elaborated. The concept of 'memory vacuum' is introduce…
Szolidaritás a késő modernitásban
A tanulmány célja, hogy kísérletet tegyen az integrációs és morálfenomenológiai szempont-ból egyaránt kulcsfontosságúnak tekintett szolidaritás késő modern sajátosságainak jellemzésére. Első lé-pésben a vallási-rendi paradigmát felváltó társadalombiztosítási logika kialakulásának, majd – a globális információs társadalom expanziója következtében – kérdésessé válásának bemutatására kerül sor. Máso-dik lépésben a szolidaritás késő modern lehetőségt…
Búcsú Csákó Mihálytól (1941–2019)
A negatív integrációtól a félelem szociológiájáig
A tanulmány célja, hogy elemzési szempontokat kínáljon a félelem szociológiai vizsgálatához, és előkészítse a modernizáció folyamatával való összefüggések feltárását. Ehhez első lépésben egy a társadalomelméleti hagyományban háttérbe szoruló kérdés megválaszolására kerül sor: a társadalmi integráció motivációs bázisa negatív (az alapértelmezésben korlátlan személyes szabadság társadalmasulást lehetővé tevő önkorlátozása, fenyegetettségérzés okán)…
From mental disorders to social suffering: Making sense of depression for critical theories
This article aims at grounding critical theories with the help of psy discourses. Even if the relationship between the two disciplines has always been a controversial one, the article argues that therapeutic knowledge that accesses empirical forms of social suffering may offer important insights for critical theory. This general argument is demonstrated by complementing the theories of Bourdieu and Habermas with a clinical description of depressi…
From Naturalized Suffering to Futile Ownership-A Genealogy of the Depressed Lifeworld
While several separate researches focus on either the phenomenological description of depression, or on the modernization theoretical analysis of the structural transformations responsible for its emergence, the combination of both perspectives is still rare. The article aims at filling this gap by analysing modernization from the perspective of the phenomenological preconditions of depression. A depressed lifeworld is characterized by burdensome…
Machine Learning of Concepts Hard Even for Humans: The Case of Online Depression Forums
Social scientists of mixed-methods research have traditionally used human annotators to classify texts according to some predefined knowledge. The 'big data' revolution, the fast growth of digitized texts in recent years brings new opportunities but also new challenges. In our research project, we aim to examine the potential for natural language processing (NLP) techniques to understand the individual framing of depression in online forums. In t…
Towards a social theory of fear: A phenomenology of negative integration
Despite its undisputed importance, fear is yet to become a distinct research area for social theory. However, without a clear conceptualization of fear, the explanation of significant phenomena, such as the risk-related anxiety or the conflict of the global and the local, remains incomplete. This article aims at reintroducing fear at the fundamental level of social integration. First, the social contract theories of Hobbes and Rousseau are reinte…
Power from indirect pain: A historical phenomenology of medical pain management
The article aims at reconstructing how pain is used in contemporary societies in the process of engraving power. Firstly, a social phenomenological analysis of pain is conducted: Husserl’s and Merleau-Ponty’s ideas are used for clarifying the experience of pain itself; Elaine Scarry’s analyses are overviewed in order to reconstruct how pain contributes to the establishing of power. Secondly, this complex approach is applied in early modern contex…
From Lay Depression Narratives to Secular Ritual Healing: An Online Ethnography of Mental Health Forums
The article aims at analysing online depression forums enabling lay reinterpretation and criticism of expert biomedical discourses. Firstly, two contrasting interpretations of depression are reconstructed: expert psy-discourses are confronted with the phenomenological descriptions of lay experiences, with a special emphasis on online forums as empirical platforms hosting such debates. After clarifying the general theoretical stakes concerning con…
The asymmetries of the biopsychosocial model of depression in lay discourses - Topic modelling online depression forums
Biomedical discourse is underrepresented in lay discussions, while psychological discourse plays an overall dominant role. Even if actors are initially aware of the social mechanisms contributing to depression, they neglect these factors when it comes to considering the countermeasures
Bio, psycho, or social: Supervised machine learning to classify discursive framing of depression in online health communities
Supervised machine learning on textual data has successful industrial/business applications, but it is an open question whether it can be utilized in social knowledge building outside the scope of hermeneutically more trivial cases. Combining sociology and data science raises several methodological and epistemological questions. In our study the discursive framing of depression is explored in online health communities. Three discursive frameworks…
Towards a post-pandemic social contract
Social contract theories serve a twofold purpose: by addressing acute crises, they elaborate solutions to long-standing social paradoxes. The article reinterprets the stakes of the Covid pandemic from this perspective. Firstly, the long-lasting structural paradoxes of late modernity are linked to the acute crisis of the pandemic with the help of critical theories of late modernity. It is argued that the pandemic provides opportunity for revaluati…
Empty satisfaction—a social phenomenology of late modern enjoyment
Phenomenological analyses of enjoyment are relatively rare; also, the few known attempts (e.g. Levinas) are elaborated in a transcendental fashion, without reflecting on the socio-historical constituents. The article aims at filling this gap by elaborating a social phenomenology of late modern enjoyment. Firstly, the experience is analysed with the help of general phenomenological descriptions: the visceral, existential and ethical constituents a…
Populist Juggling with Fear: The Case of Hungary
In this article, the interrelatedness of contemporary populism and fear is analysed. It is argued that contemporary populism is burdened with the uncertainties and contingencies of late modernity. Therefore, it is not capable of merely “instrumentalizing” fear (i.e., relying on fear as an instrument of ideological goals). Instead, populism is forced to “juggle” with fear in a continuously changing, unpredictable constellation. In the first sectio…
Towards a post-pandemic social contract
Social contract theories serve a twofold purpose: by addressing acute crises, they elaborate solutions to long-standing social paradoxes. The article reinterprets the stakes of the Covid pandemic from this perspective. Firstly, the long-lasting structural paradoxes of late modernity are linked to the acute crisis of the pandemic with the help of critical theories of late modernity. It is argued that the pandemic provides opportunity for revaluati…
Depression in times of a pandemic – the impact of Covid-19 on the lay discourses of e-mental health communities
The article aims at exploring the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the lay discourses of depression emerging in online mental health forums. The narrative framing of depression plays a central role not only because it affects the instrumental strategies of depressed people (e.g., preferred therapy), but also because it is a constitutive element of the identity of depressed people, thus affects the process of recovery itself. COVID-19 had a seri…
Rigid Flesh – Towards the Critique of Technologically Mediated Chiasm
Technology has been at the centre of existentialist (e.g. Heidegger) and sociological (e.g. Marcuse) critique for a long time. The latest versions of criticism rely on the results of "science and technology studies": they argue that essentialist conceptualisations of technology should be replaced while aiming at "democratizing technology" (e.g. Feenberg). However, even these approaches are characterised by a shortcoming when it comes to providing…
Distorted flesh – Towards a non-speculative concept of social pathology
The article aims at elaborating a non-speculative concept of social pathology. In the first section, various conceptualizations (e.g. Habermas, Honneth) are critically revaluated. It is argued that (a) applying the originally medical concept of ‘pathology’ on social entities has untenable connotations (due to the lacking social equivalent of death); (b) grounding social pathology on the level of ‘social suffering’ is not in accordance with the ac…
Justifying the paradoxes of modernity: On the emergence of contemporary cynical discourses
Late modern existence is built around ambivalences: subjects experience the structural paradoxes of global capitalism or information society as social suffering; yet they follow behaviour patterns reinforcing the unsustainable trajectories. The article explores the discourses justifying such structural paradoxes, while normalizing the related suffering. First, the pragmatic theory of justification (Boltanski, Thévenot) is reinterpreted from a mod…
From Scapegoating to the Culture of Cruelty: (Mis)Managing Mimetic Desire and Violence in Late Modernity
Due to the 'civilizing process' (Elias), the overall level of violence is decreasing; yet its transforming patterns persist. The article aims at examining the contemporary structures and mechanisms responsible for violence control, while also exploring the newly emerging, naturalized patterns of cruelty. Firstly, René Girard's mimetic theory is overviewed: while in archaic societies, mimetic crisis is controlled by sacrificial rites, modernizatio…
Socialized into depression – toward a social phenomenological psychopathology
The article aims at expanding the horizon of phenomenological psychopathology of depression from a social theoretical perspective. Based on Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological ontology, in the first section, depression is reinterpreted as a disruption of chiasm: it is not merely the illness of the body, the disorder of the mind, or a specific form of social suffering, but the interrelated distortion of time consciousness, agency, and interaffectivit…
Between Depression and Alienation: Burnout as a Translator Category for Critical Theories
The horizon of critical theories and their target audience (i.e., the subjects exposed to social suffering) have drifted apart. While the former relies on its own set of diagnostic concepts (e.g., alienation), the actors are socialized within the frames of biomedical discourses. This creates a rupture between theory and praxis: the concepts of social suffering fail to orient collective action. To overcome this challenge, a translator category is …
Structural Deprivation, Rural Segregation, and Substance Use—A Hungarian Case Study
New designer drugs are a major public health concern, particularly in disadvantaged, segregated communities. While the phenomenon is better understood in urban settings, it remains unexplored in rural areas. This gap explains our research rationale: an interdisciplinary survey was designed; the fieldwork took place in Hungary, in a segregated rural area ( n = 425), in 2022. The complex sociological-psychological-existential trap represented by ru…
Critique and consolation: Countering 'activist fatigue' in a non-therapeutic way
Contemporary emancipatory praxis is undermined by 'activist fatigue' related to the uncertain efficiency of collective action. The article investigates the phenomenon from a critical theoretical perspective. The crisis of praxis is inseparable from the crisis of theory: to resolve them, critical theory's relation to suffering needs to be revised. To provide an alternative framework, the perspective of consolation is proposed as a counter to activ…
Sociology (16 works) · Psychology (13 works) · Epistemology (12 works) · Political science (12 works) · Philosophy (10 works) · Law (8 works) · Modernity (6 works) · Politics (6 works) · Social Psychology (6 works) · Aesthetics (5 works)