POOR HEALTH AND HOSTILITY TOWARD IMMIGRANTS?
New study traces how ill health translates into anti-immigrant sentiment.
May 13, 20252 min read
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Gabor Scheiring, PhD
Political Economist, Public Sociologist
GS
May 21, 2025
May 21, 2025
What i do?
RESEARCH
My research examines the human consequences of contemporary global economic transformations and their relationship to precarity, illiberalism, and democratic stability. Using a combination of advanced quantitative approaches, comparative analysis, and qualitative methods, I explore how economic shocks shape lived experiences of class, contributing to mental and physical suffering as well as broader political and social change. As a first-generation academic, and a former politician and social organizer, I have personal experience with most of the topics I research.
POLICY / ADVISORY
As a former MP in the Hungarian National Assembly and engaged global citizen, I am committed to translating theoretical insight into policy. These experiences continue to inform my advisory and policy work, particularly in the areas of social inequality, economic transformation, public health, and democratic resilience. I bridge the gap between academic research and practical policymaking by developing evidence-based responses to the social consequences of economic change.
COMMENTARY
I regard social science as a tool to understand real-world problems, which can eventually lead to evidence-based action. I regularly write opinion essays and provide recurring, organically generated expert commentary on illiberalism, the global far right, international political economy, European and Hungarian politics across English, French, Dutch, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Polish, Italian, Chinese, and Japanese-language outlets across six continents, including wide coverage in Hungarian media.
TEACHING
My teaching brings the social scientific imagination to bear on problems students face as citizens and professionals. At Georgetown Qatar I teach political economy, populism, methods, and development, building theoretical, empirical, and applied skills together. Small classes work as participatory spaces: students engage with research articles, develop podcasts, collaboratively design policy proposals, craft research designs, and simulate political exchanges in role-play. I prepare students to think rigorously yet critically, and act ethically as citizens.
Ideas
My intellectual agenda unfolds in three threads that form one program. Uneven globalization devalues people’s economic, cultural, and political standing, producingembodied suffering. Political entrepreneurs exploit that suffering, undermining democracy. Economic and democratic revival hinges on transformative alternatives.
HOW ECONOMIC CRISES BECOME PERSONAL
When economies break down, statistics of devaluation hide fractured communities, despair, and physical illness. Tracing the path from macroeconomic shock to lived suffering, I reveal how the destruction of the social fabric gets under our skin.
THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF DEVELOPMENT
Underdevelopment is often a structural design rather than an accident, forcing peripheral communities in both the Global South and the West to absorb the costs of globalization. By analyzing global economic hierarchies and dependency capitalism, I investigate the production of these peripheries and the alternative paths to development.
THE DECLINE AND REVIVAL OF DEMOCRACY
Illiberalism feeds on the wreckage of broken hopes, the combined devaluation of economic, cultural and political worth, and the absence of transformative democratic alternatives. Drawing on scholarship and my experience as a former parliamentarian, I examine how these dynamics erode democracy and identify the conditions of revival.
Contact
GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY IN QATAR EDUCATION CITY
Qatar Foundation
P.O. Box 23689
Doha Qatar
Room Number 0D11
Contact: +974 4457 8375
Email: gabor [at] gaborscheiring.com
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