Are interethnic marriages bridges or fault lines in post-conflict societies? What happens when the politics of national identity enter the intimacy of home? Who were the main agents to oppose or promote mixed marriages in East-Central Europe? Was it the Church? Was it the legal framework? Were it depending on local culture? Was it determined by class?
In our podcast in two parts, we discuss this topic with Karolina Lendák-Kabók and Lucija Balikić, around their research project called entitled “Mixed Families: Searching for Identity and Belonging in Post-Conflict Societies”. Their research group emerges from the The Momentum (Lendület) 2025 project hosted at Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE), Faculty of Social Sciences, Department of Minority Studies and it is financed by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences – Flagship Program of the Academy.
By following marriages that crossed lines of language, confession, and social status, the research project “Mixed Families: Searching for Identity and Belonging in Post-Conflict Societies” trace how states, churches, and communities sought to regulate intimacy long before they regulated borders.
In our second part, we discuss why mixedness should be treated as a long historical process instead of a simple past-present comparison. Legal norms, religious prescriptions, social expectations, and gendered assumptions shaped mixed families across generations. To unfold this complex phenomenon, Karolina Lendák-Kabók and Lucija Balikić move between micro‑level family dynamics, meso‑level institutions such as schools and churches, and macro‑level political frameworks to trace how mixedness is produced, negotiated, and transmitted over time.
The second part of this episode also explores the project’s diverse source base: legal codes, canon laws, minority association records, ego‑documents, and oral interviews. Finally, the conversation opens toward the future of the field. Karolina Lendák-Kabók and Lucija Balikić expand on emerging research avenues, including the understudied role of children in mixed families, the methodological challenges of combining quantitative and qualitative data, and the potential for expanding the geographical scope beyond Central and Southeastern Europe.
Karolina Lendák-Kabók is a social scientist with a specific interest in the intersection of gender, ethnicity, education and families. She was a Marie Sklodowksa-Curie IF at the Faculty of Social Sciences, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest from 2022-2024. Currently, she is an Associate Professor at the same university, at the Faculty of Social Sciences. Her book, National Minorities in Serbian Academia: The Role of Gender and Language Barriers, was published in 2022. Within this project, Karolina is the Principal Investigator.
Lucija Balikić defended her PhD at the Central European University by focusing on the intellectual history of the Sokol Movement in Interwar Yugoslavia. She was a Global Teaching Fellow at the Corvinus University. Her academic interests broadly include the social and intellectual history of the late Habsburg Monarchy and interwar Yugoslavia. Within MIXED, Lucija is a postdoctoral researcher focusing on the historical components.
The interview was conducted by Adrian Matus. Alina Young edited the audio file.
