Media mirrors? Framing Hungarian Romani migration to Canada in Hungarian and Canadian press

ABSTRACT

The most recent migration of Roma from Central-Eastern Europe to Canada started in the 1990s. Several thousand people from former socialist countries, including Hungarian Roma, moved overseas. There were many reasons but for Roma, the motivations not only included a drastic loss of employment, but re-emerging systemic and increasingly violent racism. This article focuses on the discursive framing of these motivations and the reaction within both Hungarian and Canadian newspapers from 1999 to 2013. In the article we show how the press engaged in framing and counter-framing the policies and politics of the host country through their coverage of “the Hungarian Roma” issue. Specifically, we focus on the differing and shifting spheres of consensus and the changing political/policy contexts by conducting an in-depth comparison of the changing media frames in Hungarian and Canadian newspaper coverage. We show how the “Hungarian Roma issue” becomes an example and reflection of the changing political culture.     

Intersectionality and mediated cultural production in a globalized post-colonial world

Abstract

This paper aims to demonstrate how intersectionality provides an important conceptual tool to analyse practices of cultural production in ethnic minority media. In the context of the digital age, media are increasingly central as systems of representation of identity, culture and community. However, research examining how ethnic minority media become engaged in struggles of power is rare. Few works have paid attention to the ways in which race and gender operate in tandem to produce and maintain the unequal distribution of power in the mediascape of countries of post-colonial immigration. This paper juxtaposes gender studies and ethnic studies in order to analyse the representation of gender in ethnic media, with a particular focus on journalistic practices.     

Do junior academic bioethicists have an obligation to be activists?

Activism and bioethics have enjoyed a somewhat strained relationship. In this paper, I consider activism specifically from the perspective of junior academics. I will argue that although there may be a prima facie duty for bioethicists to be activists, countervailing considerations for junior academics may mean that they, in particular, should refrain from undertaking activist activities. I will argue this on the basis of two key claims. First, I argue that activism may come at a potential cost to the academics who undertake it, and that these costs are potentially of greatest detriment to junior academics undertaking activism. Second, I argue that junior academics are likely to be less effective activists than established academics. Moreover, undertaking activism as a junior academic may prevent one from becoming an effective activist later. Finally, I will discuss the implications of this argument for activist commitments later in one’s career.     

Reconstructing the Origins and Migrations of Diasporic Populations: The Case of the European Gypsies

The sociohistorical study of Gypsies/Sinti/Roma has been dominated by the "Gypsy-lorist" paradigm. According to this paradigm, these itinerant people belong to a unitary ethnic group of South Asian origin whose cultural practices have been preserved over the centuries. Recently, this perspective has come under criticism for perpetuating the image of Gypsies as an isolate within the wider context of the development of European societies, and, in particular, for placing too much importance on the external origin of Gypsy cultural and linguistic practices. This article attempts to place the available biological anthropological data for Roma origins and population history (from molecular genetic and clinical studies) in the wider ethnohistorical and linguistic context, and assesses their potential impact for an integrationist approach to Gypsy studies. These data suggest that, while the "Gypsy-lorist" paradigm is problematic, Gypsy populations share a common biological origin, a reality that should not be ignored.     

Constituted through Conflict: Images of Community (and Nation) in Bulgarian Rural Ritual

Following the 20th anniversary of Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities, this article extrapolates how attention to actual notions of community might redirect his important intervention. It suggests that locally and culturally specific ideas about collectivity shape the experience and expectations of national-level projections. To demonstrate this outcome the analysis focuses on Bulgarian mumming—spectacular winter rituals in which threatening masked figures transverse villages to banish evil and bring good fortune. While these rituals clearly reinforce social solidarity, they represent a local notion of community in which conflict, both intra-and interethnic, is elemental and constitutive. This image of community does not demand consensus or homogeneity when imagined on a national scale. Such variations in community notions may help explain the diversity of national experiences increasingly documented by ethnographers.     

Does being Roma matter? Ethnic boundaries and stigma spillover in musical consumption

Manele songs, an updated version of traditional Romani music, are excluded from mainstream Romanian media due to their association with the country’s large Roma minority. The genre is at the intersection between Romania’s democratic transition and growing efforts to strengthen boundaries between the country’s marginalized Romani minority and the non-Romani majority population. But we find that media discussions around manele underscore a fluid relationship between ethnic boundaries and stigmatized cultural consumption. All those who listen to manele are portrayed in negative terms by the media, no matter whether ethnic markers are used as part of the portrayal. In the context of manele, genre-based stereotypes extend beyond ethnic boundaries to assign negative social value to a wide swathe of people who consume the genre. The stigma spillover surrounding manele audiences therefore underlines the ways in which Roma identity is fluid, and anyone associated with the Roma can be relegated to the lower rungs of social status. Manele show how the political process of ethnic boundary-making draws a wide net over those located at the bottom of power hierarchies.     

A Plan to Coordinate the Culture of the Three Americas

Music education has always required advocacy to solidify its place in the school curriculum. Music teachers are increasingly called on to justify their existence and importance in the schools, and yet, are often unprepared to advocate on their own behalf without the use of advocacy materials that are created on the basis of questionable research, questionable interpretations of valid research, or materials that demean the profession. This practical advocacy crisis is created by the lack of a solid philosophical basis for music education advocacy, the profusion of questionable advocacy materials available, and the lack of lobbying at the federal and state levels for meaningful laws that give arts education true core status. In the article, the author discusses suggestions for improving advocacy methods and materials.     

Introduction to the special issue: racialized bordering discourses on European Roma

ABSTRACT

In the introduction to this special issue, we briefly introduce everyday bordering as the theoretical framing for the papers and explore its relationship to the process of racialization. We introduce our situated intersectional approach to the study of everyday bordering, illustrating the importance of capturing the differentially situated gazes of a range of social actors. We then go on to contextualize the importance of this framing and approach in a wider discussion of Roma in Europe before concluding with a summary of the particular contributions of each of the papers in this special issue to these debates.