Contemplation on everyday thought-provoking experiences

Obama's presidential election and the effects on confirmative action discussions in the US press

2010-01-23T05:02:00.000-08:00

The main question here is whether discussions of affirmative action, race and racism in the US newspapers have changed with time and namely with the approaching of the US presidential elections and the successful candidacy of Barack Obama.

The main assumption is that, because of Barack Obama’s candidacy for a president and his success during the last months prior US elections, newspapers would maybe find discussions on affirmative action and racial injustice not that necessary.
The findings can also reveal the opposite assumption, namely that the success of Barack Obama in the pre-election months, contributed to an increase in discussions on affirmative action and racial injustice in the American press.

Main theoretical considerations for this assignment are that the candidacy for a president of an African-American man provides an explicit example of racial progress, which on its own could bring about a decreased concern for issues of racial injustice. Even though this candidacy implies racial progress, people shall also be reminded that often exceptions to the rule are merely used for reinforcing that same long-existent rule, more specifically that an African-American running for a president could be a sign of racial progress but it could also be a reinforcement of racial injustice by implying that after such personal achievement, it is no longer relevant to discuss racial inequality and discrimination. The results could be important for revealing what the journalists’ practices were and if there is a need for a change.

The materials which have been used are articles from the two leading newspapers in the USA, namely the New York Times and the USA Today, where these articles were published a few months before the US presidential elections, namely in August, September, October and November 2008.

As for the two sources, the USA today is a daily broadsheet, said to be the most widely-read newspaper in the United States with a readership of 4.3 million readers, and also known for synthesizing news down to easy-to-read-and-comprehend stories.

The New York Times is also a daily broadsheet, which is said to avoid sensationalism in order to appeal to cultured, intellectual readers. Having in mind that both newspapers are quality daily broadsheets, the sources which have been used do not seem to be much different from each other, which is a good for the validity of the results.

In order to find out whether discussions on race and affirmative action have increased or decreased in American newspapers with the approaching of the election of the new president of the USA, we will use the AmCAT software and would use the keywords “affirmative” and “racis*”.

Initially, the words which were used were “affirmative”, “action” and “race” but the use of these words turned out to be problematic for the software, since any time the word “action” was used in an article it was presented as a result, although it had nothing to do with affirmative action. Another problem with the initial search was that “race” was not a good keyword, since “race” can have a number of meanings, ranging from any contest or competition (especially prominent word during elections and election campaigns), to a group of persons related by common descent or heredity.

Thus, the decision which was made was to include “affirmative” as a main keyword, due to the fact that almost always when newspapers/journalists use this word, it is used in relation to “action” and it refers to affirmative action (see Appendix 1). The second keyword which was used was “racis*”, which would mean that the words which have been counted in the articles are the words “racism” and “racist”, thus excluding words such as race, racing etc. The name of Barack Obama was not included in the word-search, since his election as a president is more important for marking a certain time period for this type of research question. After all, the main focus is on whether there is a change in discussing/mentioning affirmative action and racial injustice with the approaching of the presidential elections and not really the connections/associations between these words and the president himself.

The results of this research showed that with the approach of the US presidential elections, especially in the months of October and November, and after the US presidential election on 4 Nov 2008, newspapers mentioned/discussed racism and affirmative action less often, when compared to the month of August for example.

affirmative Racis*
2008-8 14 21
2008-9 5 12
2008-10 3 26
2008-11 1 9
Count 23 68

Table 1.

Table 2.

Interesting is also the fact that, while for affirmative action the decrease over time is stable, for “racism” and “racist” this is not the case. A more detailed qualitative look at the 26 articles which include keywords “racis*” from the month of October clarifies the fact that during the month prior to the US elections both newspapers have published articles in which they’ve discussed the potential impact of racist sentiments among Americans for their electoral choice. Later this was found to be the case for the NY Times.

When we look at the distribution of articles per medium, The New York Times refers to these two keywords in 62 articles, while the USA today refers to them in 21. These findings could be indicative of the fact that overall, The New York Times is a newspaper which pays more importance to issues of racism and affirmative action than the USA Today. We can also imply that the newspaper with the most readership in the USA mentions issues of racism and affirmative action far less often when compared with the New York Times.

Table 3.

Additionally, while the trend of mentioning/discussing affirmative action and racism stably decreases throughout the months prior to the US elections in the USA Today newspaper, this is not the case of the NY Times, especially for the month of September.

To Conclude:

From the findings now, it is clear that the overall trend in news reporting is that with the approaching success of Barack Obama in the presidential election, journalists found it less important to mention/discuss racism and affirmative action, maybe due to the racial progress which Obama’s successful candidacy implied. This decreasing trend can be better seen for issues of affirmative action and mainly for the USA today.

Roma representations in popular Hollywood movies and series

2010-01-23T04:17:00.000-08:00

Introduction and Problem Statement

Roma, also known as gypsies, are one of the biggest and most quintessential minority groups in Europe. Although Roma have lived in Europe for more than 500 years and are estimated to be around twelve million now, they are still considered strangers who are alienated from the majority of the population.

According to the results of surveys on attitudes, stereotypes, prejudices and social distance toward ethnic and religious minorities in all the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, the Roma are the most rejected of all minority groups (Csepeli, 2004). A number of social, political and historical studies of Roma communities in different European countries explain the continual marginal status of the Roma as resulting from different factors such as the changes of political regimes and state policies in Eastern Europe (Gounev, 2006, Cooper, 2001/2002; Spirova, 2000; Marushiakova, 1997; Stewart, 1997), the negative social attitudes of majorities towards Roma (Csepeli, 2004), the differences in culture, customs, values behaviour, and appearance (Barany, 2002), the Romas’ own cultivation of their marginal status (Barany, 2002), their poor economic conditions and overcriminalization (Gounev, 2006), and the influence of the media in establishing and further enhancing the negative stereotypes of Roma (Pamporov, 2007).

Strangely enough, the media is not much recognized as an influential factor for the marginalization of Roma. Researches on the different media are few, most of them done by the European Roma Rights Centre (ERRC) and focused on the local press in different Central and Eastern European countries (Bernáth & Messing, 1999; Fenyvesi, 1999; Galjus, 1999; Hanganu, 1999; Klimkiewicz, 1999, Russinov, 1999; Rougheri, 1999).

The local focus which the ERRC has in its researches has recently been criticized by some authors who state that the Center downplays instances of marginalization of Roma in Western societies, thus creating “the misperception that Roma marginalization is an issue emerging out of the problems of post-socialist liberal development” (Atanasoski, 2009).

Although the media encompasses many different forms of distributions of news and entertainment, most media researches on Roma are focused on the print press, widely neglecting media forms such as movies, soap operas, and series. This is a big shortcoming in the research on Roma, since popular culture is meaningful in shaping how we view ourselves and those around us (Croteau & Hoynes, 2000).

Although, much of the research on popular culture recognizes the influence of the West, the ERRC has not yet recognized the need to research how the West represents the Roma minority group. An understanding of the frames used for Roma in the Western media, especially in Western popular culture, is essential because this could provide us with clues about social cognition and behavior towards Gypsies (McCullick et al., 2003).

Last but not least, although Hollywood has been long recognized as the Mecca for the production of popular culture, research on representations of the Roma minority in Hollywood movies does not exist yet.

Research on Roma still lacks a decisive answer to many important questions. For example, how are Gypsies represented in Western popular culture? Can we develop a theoretical model for current Roma representations in Western popular culture? Are there changes in Roma representations during different time periods? Are there differences in the representation of Roma based on movie type and movie genre? Which sections of the Gypsy population are being represented in Hollywood movies? Are gypsies talking or being referred to and what are they actually saying when they are talking?

Although the answers to these questions would provide us with important information, too little is known about how media entertainment represents the Roma minority group. The time is right, therefore, to develop a comprehensive stance and to inform the academic and the public debate. The goal of this research project is to initiate and develop a pattern of producing research on the representations of Roma in Western popular culture, as well as to develop a comprehensive theoretical model for the representations of Gypsies in the media.

Aims, Innovativeness and Importance of the Project

The aims of this proposal is to fill the gaps in previous research on Roma representations in the media by establishing two new foci – focus on the Western media, and a focus on popular culture, where popular culture is identified and influenced by images in Hollywood movies, series and soap operas.

My project is the first one to propose an investigation of Western representations of Gypsies in popular culture, something which, in my opinion, the ERRC needs, especially after the critiques which the Center has received, concerning the lack of focus on the marginalization of Gypsies in the West. On its own terms, this project will also be the first one to conduct research on Roma representations in a different form of media by distancing from newspaper coverage on Roma in Eastern and Central Europe and focusing on Hollywood movies, series and soap operas. In this project, I also propose the development of a theoretical model for the current representations of Roma in Western popular culture – a development which is also innovative and uniquely contributing to the project.

Therefore, the goal of this project is three-fold: (a) to discover the representations of Roma in Hollywood productions (b) to look for patterns of different Roma representations based on year of production of movies and series, type of production, genre of production, production ranking (c) to develop a theoretical model of current Roma representations in popular Western movies.

Methods and Approach

Data Collection

In order to identify the Hollywood movies, series and soap operas which represent the Roma minority group, the materials/movies will be chosen by using the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), an online collection of international movie information, reviews and audience comments that claims to attract over 25 million site visitors a month (van Zoonen, 2007). The IMDb is considered the biggest movie database which deals with the filmographies for over 2.3 million people and over 931,000 titles as it has also been successfully used in previous academic researches (McCullick et al., 2003; Zuckerman et al., 2003; Gunasekera et al., 2005; Dodds, 2006; Sood & Dreze, 2006; van Zoonen, 2007). Since the 1990s, the web-based capabilities of the IMDb have improved, as it was expanded to include new features such as votes awarded to individual films (out of 10), updates on movie releases and film gossip as well as extracted quotations from films which identify the main plots, actors and stories in a movie.

The identification of the movie materials for this project will be done via the quotation search function of the IMDb, where the keywords used for the search will be “gypsy” and “Roma” (the movie-search with keyword “Roma” requires a second detailed manual selection of relevant movies from these search results, since the key-word has a number of meanings). After the movies have been identified, they will be viewed on tapes and analyzed.

It is important that the analysis of the movies happens within and between the authentic sources (the movies themselves) (Scott, 1990), so that the validity of the research is enhanced. If the identified quotations are the only data used for the analysis, this could seriously hinder adequate assessment of the quotation meanings, since the quotations are given out of context, without a reference to the images and the settings which accompany them. Therefore, the quotation search will be only used for the identification of films which represent the Roma.

The time period for the movie analysis will encompass the years from 1990 till 2010. There is a practical reason for this choice, namely the restricted availability of older movie productions in which Roma are represented/ referred to (e.g. “Room Service”(1938); “The House of Frankenstein”(1944); “The Loves of Carmen” (1948)). It is quite difficult to get hold of tapes of such old movies. However, the time period is not a hindrance for the project, since the main goal is to analyze movies that are relevant to the current attitudes towards Roma. It is rather logical to appoint the past two decades as the time period of the movie analysis.

Lastly, IMDb is by far not an all-encompassing movie database that includes all the movies and television series which refer to the Roma minority group. This might cause the exclusion of some movies representing Roma, especially if the reference to Roma is too vague on the database or if the part on gypsies in the movie is too small to be listed. Apart from this recognized shortcoming, the IMDb is still remains the most complete movie database which can be used for identifying relevant data.

Data Analysis

After the data is collected, I will view the tapes of the movies independently while taking notes on the conversations and camera shots involving Roma. The notes will be later used for establishing and constructing themes regarding the representation of the Roma minority group in the movies and will later aid the development of a theoretical model for the representation of Roma in Western popular culture.

The main approach to the analysis will be qualitative. This approach allows that relevant meaning emerges from the data. The main tool for the identification of the themes and the categories of Roma representation will be ethnographic content analysis, a method proposed by Altheide (1996). This method is a media studies variation of another widely-used research method proposed by Glaser and Strauss (1967) – the constant comparative method (CCM) and its aim is to be systematic and analytic, but not rigid (McCullick et al., 2003). The method will aid the assessment and grouping of categories and themes of Roma representation, by constantly comparing the information within and between different movies. A system of classification will be developed by comparing notes and when certain commonalities are discovered in the data, they will be used for the development of a theoretical model for Roma representation (McCullick et al.,2003).

What is more, after the main themes and categories have been identified the analysis will proceed quantitatively. Thus, data such as the names of the movies/series, the year of release, the movie genre (fantasy, action, crime etc.), the movie type (being either movie or series) and the user ratings will be also recorded for each movie (Sood & Dreze, 2006). This data can be later used to questions of whether there are changes of Roma representations dependent on the different movie characteristics. The quantitative data model will also keep track on characters, namely which character is talking in the sections in which Roma are present, the character’s gender and ethnicity and whether the main representations of Roma have something to do with who is talking (Appendix 1).

In order to illustrate the proposed project, the following section presents two preliminary small scale studies based on the topic (a qualitative and a quantitative one).

Preliminary Small-scale Qualitative Study

The small-scale research on Roma in popular Hollywood productions was conducted in 2009 and already by this research some interesting findings were on the way. The research was based on quotations on Roma which the IMDb search engine identified by the key-word “gypsy”. The keyword “Roma” was not used in this small scale research due to the previously-stated considerations and the time which is needed to identify relevant movies with it. The quotes referring to gypsies were collected and printed on 19 April 2009. A total of 247 quotes were gathered. These quotes were included in 80 Hollywood productions released between the year 1892 and 2009 (37 movies/series were released between 1990 and 2009). The year of production was not restricted in this study and all of the quotations were analyzed.

The names of the movies/series, the year of release, the movie genre, user ratings, speaking characters, and their gender and ethnicity were also recorded (Sood & Dreze, 2006). This data was collected for the quantitative analysis on the topic.

While the qualitative case study aimed at answering the question of how are Roma represented in Western popular culture, the quantitative case study aims to answer questions such as: Are Roma representations dependent on some of the characteristics of the Hollywood productions.

Provisional Small Scale Qualitative Study

The quotations data which was collected was qualitatively analyzed by implementing Glaser and Strauss’s (1967) constant comparative method (CCM). In order to avoid the problem of analyzing quotations out of movie context, I read in advance the plots of the movies, their synopses and character descriptions (all of these are options are provided by the IMDb). The comparisons of the data happened on three levels:

Comparison of quotes within one movie/series (open coding)
Comparison of quotes within the same group (quotes from movies/series which were attributed to the same/similar categories or codes) (axial coding)
Comparison of quotes within different groups

During the open coding, the line-by-line reading of the data yielded 133 codes in total. I arranged the array of codes into families, developing five provisional categories of Gypsy representation, namely (1) Gypsy and love, (2) Gypsy and the supernatural, (3) Gypsy and materialism, (4) Gypsy and music, (5) personal characteristics of Gypsies (see Appendix 2). During the second step (axial coding), a shift was made towards better description of the categories and thus defining the concepts which were involved in them. The aim of the comparison in this step was to find the concepts that were involved in the main categories and to identify the properties of these categories. The last step involved a comparison between the quotes from the different categories and the identification of potential patterns/relationships among them.

Preliminary Results

Some of the tentative results from this study revealed that there are five repetitive themes which occur in the representation of Roma in Western Hollywood movies. These themes could be barely characterized as positive in their representation of the Roma minority group.

Gypsy and Love

The “love theme” represents Gypsy women as promiscuous and seductive, often making non-Gypsy men fall in love with them and then leaving. This theme was also associated with the “supernatural”, and “personal characteristics” themes, since in a number of different movie quotations, gypsy women are portrayed as making men fall in love with them by using magic and then leaving those men, because of their personal characteristics and their inability to settle down (also related to claims of the nomadic nature of gypsies).

A quotation which represents some these claims is:

Frollo: You idiot! That wasn't kindness! It was cunning! She's a Gypsy! Gypsies are not capable of real love! Think, boy! Think of your MOTHER! The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996)

Gypsy and the Supernatural

The supernatural theme has been identified as one of the main themes in the representation of Roma in Hollywood movie quotations. The gypsies who are related to the supernatural are in most of the cases women, who are seen as either witches (making curses and using magic) or fortunetelles (palm- and card-readers). The “supernatural” theme was also closely related to the “personal characteristics” theme of gypsies, namely their representation as evil, cunning and jealous as well as to the “materialistic” theme, where gypsy fortunetellers are represented as always ready to bargain and demanding pay offs. Exemplary quotations are:

Floretta the Gypsy: [about Barnaby while beating and bending his hand] Now this is the palm of a cad. A sly reprobate and a mean one. Corrupt and malicious. Conniving and vicious! A scoundrel if ever I've seen one.Babes in Toyland (1961)

and:

The Spleen: So glad you asked. Excuse me. Excuse me. Excuse me. Well, it all started when I was just 13 years of age. One day, while walking with some friends, I accidentally cut the cheese. Well, in my adolescent awkwardness, I blamed it on an old gypsy woman who happened to be passing by. BIG MISTAKE! The gypsy woman placed a curse upon my head. Because I smelled it, she decreed I would forevermore BE HE WHO DEALT IT! Mystery Men (1999)

Gypsy and Materialism

The “materialism” theme represents gypsies in a number of categories. Apart from “materialism” being related to the “supernatural” theme and fortunetelling, materialism is also seen in the representation of Roma as robbers, kidnappers, and baby traders. The “materialism” theme is also related to the “personal characteristics” of Roma, namely that they are inclined to cheat and commit different types of crimes. What is unclear from this preliminary analysis, however, is that there are a few contradictions in this “theme” – on the one hand Roma are represented as having a great interest in money, while on the other, they are represented as extremely poor and uninterested in making money. A more detailed analysis is needed in order to find out the reasons for this contradiction.

Gypsy and Music

This theme represents Roma in close relation to music mainly due to a number of quotations of three biographic movies about a famous stripper, called Gypsy Rose Lee. The name of the stripper is also referred to in a few other non-biographic movies. What is more, this theme is also very closely related to gypsy promiscuity and the “love” theme.

Gypsies and Personal Characteristics

The “personal characteristics” theme is one of the least developed themes in this study, since it encompasses a number of various categories. Although the categories in this theme are very important for the representation of Roma in Hollywood movies, this theme needs to be further developed, since some of the categories can be better organized and conceptualized. The categories which were discovered in this theme were related to gypsy skills, gypsy nature, and the gypsy lifestyle.

Interesting to note are also other contradictions in the personal characteristics of Roma. It is unclear whether Gypsies bring about good luck or bad luck as well as whether Gypsies are honoured or ashamed of their origin. These two examples need to be better looked at, as well as the context in which they were used, in order to explain the contradiction.

Important to note, these findings are just provisional and not necessarily valid. The validity of the study will be later enhanced when the movies are analyzed in their entirety and the quotations are used in their original contexts. A suggestion for the future results is to better conceptualize and specify some of the categories/theme. This is especially true for the “personal characteristics” theme and the “music” theme. What is more, some of the contradictions which the data produced need to be better looked at and better explained. Important to note is that the time period was not restricted for this study which means that some of the representations could be no more relevant for the current representations of gypsies. Additional shortcoming is that the “Roma” key-word was not used for the identification of movie quotations therefore it is plausible that many movies are not yet included in the sample. Lastly, the findings of this study are still not good enough to be able to develop a theoretical model. These are still the goals of the actual project proposal.

Constant Comparative Method (CCM)
Open Coding	Outcome: Categories
	Love Supernatural Materialistic Music Personal Characteristics
Axial Coding	Categories	Concepts/Elaboration	Examples
	Gypsies and love	Gypsy women making men falling in love with them	Dr. Gustav Niemann: No! You think I'd wreck the work of a lifetime because you're in love with a, a Gypsy girl? House of Frankenstein (1944) Ramona: Look at him; Patrick Harper, my husband. Making a fool of himself, over a gypsy girl! You know what I'd like to do to her? Sharpe's Mission (1996)
		Gypsies and promiscuity -kissing a Gypsy -sex implications -no able of real love -stripper image of Gypsy Rose Lee	Gypsy Smith: I'm not the marrying kind Children of the Dust (1995) Frollo: You idiot! That wasn't kindness! It was cunning! She's a Gypsy! Gypsies are not capable of real love! Think, boy! Think of your MOTHER! The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996) Angelus: Hey, open book. Anything you want to know. How sweet that virgin gypsy tasted? Special smell of a newborn's neck? My first nun. Now that's a great story. "Angel" (1999) Louise "Gypsy Rose Lee" Hovick: My sister's the actress, mother. And I'm not a cheap stripper. I'm the highest-paid in the business. Gypsy (1962)
		Gypsy women fighting for men	Bride: Who did he marry, huh? Me! Not you, Gypsy garbage! Nobody would! The Loves of Carmen (1948)
	Gypsies and the supernatural	Gypsies and fortunetelling (also witchcraft; prayers; magic) -making predictions -making curses -cards -palm reading -tea leaves -gypsy tears	Gypsy: [narrating] I am laying out three cards, Hungarian fashion, representing Pauline's past. The Empress, eternal symbol of the female and fertility. The Emperor, symbol of fraternity and masculinity. And, the Devil, symbol of the domination of matter over spirit, of revolution and incest. But I knew this would read so. I know Pauline. She has her grandmother's soul. Lives of a Wet Pussy (1976) Johnny: This gypsy fortune-teller that's parked across the river. I hear that everybody who takes her advice is hitting it rich. Frankie and Johnny (1966) Floretta the Gypsy: [about Barnaby while beating and bending his hand] Now this is the palm of a cad. A sly reprobate and a mean one. Corrupt and malicious. Conniving and vicious! A scoundrel if ever I've seen one. Babes in Toyland (1961) Acid Queen: Gather your wits and hold on fast, Your mind must learn to roam. Just as the Gypsy Queen must do, You're gonna hit the road! My work is done, now look at him. He's never been more alive. His head it shakes, his fingers clutch. Watch his body writhe! I'm the Gypsy, the Acid Queen, Pay me before I start. I'm the Gypsy, I'm guaranteed To break your little heart. Tommy (1975) The Spleen: So glad you asked. Excuse me. Excuse me. Excuse me. Well, it all started when I was just 13 years of age. One day, while walking with some friends, I accidentally cut the cheese. Well, in my adolescent awkwardness, I blamed it on an old gypsy woman who happened to be passing by. BIG MISTAKE! The gypsy woman placed a curse upon my head. Because I smelled it, she decreed I would forevermore BE HE WHO DEALT IT! Mystery Men (1999) Johnny: I ran into a guy who told me about a gypsy fortune-teller. She's got a hot cup of tea leaves Frankie and Johnny (1966) Borat: I arrived in America's airport with clothings, US dollars, and a jar of gypsy tears to protect me from AIDS Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006)
	Gypsies and materialism	Gypsies and interest in money -bargaining -asking for pay off -trading Contradictory: -poor Gypsies	Gypsy: Nothing's free at Gypsy's "Gilmore Girls" (2000)
		Gypsies and interest in money -theft/thieves -robbery -committing crimes -buying babies -kidnapping -robbing others -cheating/grifters	Writer: Alright... Alright... So there's this baby with gigantism... In the old west... Whose also the sheriff... And he knows that the mayor knows that there's gold underneath the town... And the mayor's slowly poisoning the towns people... So the baby gets a team of rogue gypsy thieves... And they track down the mayor in his castle in Transylvania... And... Scripted. (2006)
	Gypsies and Music	-Gypsy love songs -Gypsy dancers (Gypsy Rose Lee/stripper)	Manny: Oh? Yet again it is up to me to rescue the performance. Gypsy, come. A Bug's Life (1998)
	Gypsies and personal characteristics theme	Gypsies and skills -working sloppy -making unreliable machines -unskillful -uneducated -not knowledgeable -ignorant -implicit stupidity -no social security numbers -cunning -witty -jealous	Frollo: You idiot! That wasn't kindness! It was cunning! She's a Gypsy! Gypsies are not capable of real love! Think, boy! Think of your MOTHER! The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996) Joel: Ok Gypsy, what's one plus one? "Mystery Science Theater 3000" (1988)
		Gypsies and their nature -rebels -savage -wild -untamed -outcast -nomadic (unable to settle down)	Dancaire: [about José and Carmen getting married] You will be a fine pair, you two. Payo and Gypsy, the tame and the untamed, the dog and wolf. Dog and wolf weren't created to live together. It won't work, Navarrés. You'll see. The Loves of Carmen (1948)
		Gypsies and their lifestyle -nomadic -camps -scums -cabs/trails	Holly Hamilton: Can you believe it? The Teenage Gypsy has finally settled down. Now I don't just have a home page. I have a home. The Perfect Man (2005)
		Gypsies and contradictions -bringing bad luck -bringing good luck -ashamed to be Gypsy -honoured to be Gypsy	Loretta Castorini: Oh, yes, you did! Oh, yes, you did! Y'know, you got them bad eyes, like a gypsy, and I don't know why I didn't see it yesterday. Bad luck! That's what it is. Is that all I'm ever gonna have? I should have taken a rock and killed myself years ago! Moonstruck (1987) Daisy: [a gypsy is at Daisy and Onslow's front door] It's bad luck not to buy something from a gypsy! "Keeping Up Appearances" (1990) Kim: Yes, I suppose i got... yes, 10p, here you go [hands over ten pence and puts on her gypsy voice] Now you come with me, and you will be lucky! "No 73" (1982) Sylvester: If you don't tell anybody I'm not a gypsy, I won't tell anybody you're not an idiot. The Princess and the Pirate (1944) Gypsy Leader: [considers for a moment] On my honor as a gypsy, whatever you can carry Ever After (1998)
	Gypsies and their origin (mentioned)	-Hungarian -Polish -Romanian -Russian

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Scott, J. (1990). Assessing documentary sources. In: A matter of record: Documentary sources in social research (pp. 19-35). Cambridge: Polity Press.

Sood, S., & Dreze, X. (2006). Brand extensions of experiential goods: Movie sequel evaluations. Journal of Consumer Research, 33, 352-360.

Spirova, M. (2000). Minorities in Southeast Europe: Roma of Bulgaria. Center for Documentation and Information on Minorities in Europe - Southeast Europe (CEDIME-SE)

Stewart, M. (1997). The time of the Gypsies, Oxford: Westview Press

Uderdahl, B. (2006). Access forms and reports for dummies. Indianopolis, IN: Wiley Publishing, Inc.

van Zoonen, L. (2007). Audience reactions to Hollywood politics. Media, Culture & Society, 29, 531-547.

Zuckerman, E., Kim, T., Ukanwa, K., & von Rittmann, J. (2003). Robust identities or no identities? Typecasting in the feature film labor market. The American Journal of Sociology, 108(5), 1018-1075.

Back in Time When Bulgaria Was Still an Outsider

2008-10-28T10:26:00.000-07:00

Today I was going through some of my writings from previous years just to see whether I am progressing or regressing in my thoughts and if I've become even more cynical than I used to be.. .Here's what I bumped upon... 2005 discussion on Bulgaria's entrance in the European Union. I remember this paper because when I started writing it I was so optimistic and in the end of my research the picture which I seemed to portray was not so rosy as I imagined to describe... Here is the conclusion of my Bulgaria in the European Union:

In conclusion, it seems that the European Union will bring about difficulties for Bulgaria. Integration will not be so much useful for a developing country like this one.

An alternative solution to the idea of integrating, however, does not exist. There is no other regional integration organization in Europe and soon there won’t be anything of the kind. What is more, a small and feeble country which isolates itself from integration processes, the entering of the European Union in this case, is taking greater risk than it can handle.

For countries like Switzerland and Norway keeping disintegrated may be possible but this is surely not useful for a country like Bulgaria. Bulgaria doesn’t have a bright future outside the European Community. But its future as a member of the European Union at this moment of time doesn’t seem much better either. There is also something else at work which holds true for any poor developing country – poor developing countries never have the chance to choose an alternative for themselves which alternative is a hundred percent for their benefit and well-being.

Thus, it is inevitable for Bulgaria to enter the European Union but the main conclusion here is that this entering is just not coming at the right moment. After entering the European Union in January 2007, Bulgaria will not be able yet to use all its rights and to fulfill all the EU demands. It seems that for a long time to come Bulgaria’s role in the EU will be to plead for help and understanding. This prediction doesn’t sound much positive even if it is merely for the fact that partners which do not have what to offer cannot be trusted and respected. They can be in the best possible case just treated with sympathy and understanding.

The case of Bulgaria in the European Union seems to represent the above stated. In the case of Bulgaria’s entering the European Union there is also a saying which holds true and it basically says that there are no life-long friends and life-long enemies, what is the only life-long thing that persists in time are your own interests. The European Union will reach its brightest future only if it manages to become the best developed integration organization known in history. This will only be possible if the European Union stick to the fundamental principles with which they started, namely the idea of collaboration and taking decisions which will be beneficial for the common good of the Union. If this is possible to happen or not, we can only predict.

Reviewing Butler on gender/sexuality/identity

2008-10-28T10:14:00.000-07:00

Imitation and Gender Insubordination by Judith Butler is a path-breaking, postmodern feminist piece of social theory in which Butler eloquently manages to obliterate many heterosexist assumptions rooted in Modernity, Enlightenment and ‘post-structural’ psychoanalysis on issues of gender, sexuality, identity and agency. Butler goes against the totalizing ‘grand’ narratives of these schools of thought and tries to deploy an anti-essentialist world-view. Not surprisingly, there is strong reference to works of Derrida, Lacan, Freud, Lacau and Mouffe and in a more straightforward way Michel Foucault.

In her conceptualization of gender and sexuality, Judith Butler puts a strong emphasis on the linguistic turn by focusing on the way, in which language constitutes social reality. Butler takes a Foucauldian perspective on discourse in which “discourse can be both an instrument and an effect of power, but also a point of resistance and a starting point for an opposing strategy (2001)”. Main arguments in her article are that discourses function to constitute the ‘subject’ and that discourses on sexuality and identity serve as totalizing discourses by their treatment of identity as a natural attribute while there is no foundational moment in the doing of identity. Judith Butler touches upon the idea of language as a symbol of totality when she states that gender is performative and there are no fixed identities. Performativity, however, is not seen as a chosen performance, but rather as a forced repetition of social norms which constrain heterosexuality and sustain gender identity. Subjects are seen as being compelled to perform the identities which are being prescribed to them and to continuously remake their gender and sexual identification through repetition. True to the ideas of postmodernism, Judith Butler dismisses the existence of the autonomous, goal-oriented subject who acts on the basis of feelings and intelligence where she denounces that people are free to choose their own sexuality because there are norms and conventions that precede us and which reinforce homosexuality as the “unnatural” and ”false” form of sexuality.

On the other hand, however, Butler also tries to move away from the structural determinism, which her writing implies from the treatment of the subject as unidirectional effect of totalizing discourses, and she admits that there are cases in which certain conditioned agency is being exercised; it is the ‘situated self’ who might have the chance to act depending on context. Butler relates to the iterative dimension of agency where agency is being contingent upon the repetition of social norms. Gender and sexuality are seen as obligatory social performances which are being learned, repeated, internalized and carried out in accordance to the heterosexual social matrix.

This shift in Butler’s work makes the notion of agency within the text problematic because Butler does not make clear the conditions under which the restricted minimalist iterative dimension of agency translates into intentional autonomous human practice which could potentially result in the materialization of new social forms and successful transformation of the dominating social discourse. Interesting addition to this criticism is the fact that Butler is against the practices of other feminists who claim an essential female identity and use this to promote a single feminist political agenda. What Butler sees in such practices is a reinscribtion of the already existing heterosexual/ masculine dichotomous matrix and reinforcement of the female/ homosexual ‘subject’ as the derivative other. Having Judith Butler’s position in mind, it would be reasonable to pose the question of how is then change in society going to happen and what should the vision and the actual practices of feminist politics look like.

Additional criticism on the conceptualization of agency in this work is that Judith Butler fails to develop the more active account of agency and thus she is unable to depart from the structural deterministic note in her piece. What is more, the normative goal of the paper to liberate and develop autonomy in sexual matters seems impossible to achieve where agency is being conceptualized so restrictedly and where too much power is being attributed to discourse (and culture). To consider the subject as being merely subjected to social discourse seems essentialist in its own terms.

Another point of criticism of this work is the fact that, although Butler denies foundationalism and ‘grand theorizing’, the way in which she puts her message across is still quite totalizing by her ambitious goal to reveal the truth of gender and sexuality formation.

Last critique, but not less important, concerns the research methodology and the data on which the paper is based. Although Judith Butler uses already available and well-established academic literature for basing her main arguments, she still relies too much on individual narratives based on her own experience and feelings of being homosexual.

There is this one argument based on a song of Aretha Franklin (“…you make me feel like a natural woman…”) which aims to reveal the totalizing nature of gender/sexuality discourses but this type of argumentation inserted within such a serious piece of social theory seems in a way childish and loosens the credibility of the text.

Referential to the original text:

Butler, J. (2001). Imitation and Gender Insubordination. In S. Seidman & J. Alexander (Eds.), The New Social Theory Reader (pp. 333-345). London: Routledge.

Identity and the Integration Process in Bulgaria: the Case of the Roma Minority

2007-06-29T08:46:00.000-07:00

by Plamena Ivanova

History and Origin of Roma

Origin of Roma and First Migrations to Europe

Roma, widely known as gypsies, are one of the biggest and most quintessential minority group in Europe. Although Roma have lived in Europe for more than 500 years and are estimated to be around twelve million now, they are still considered strangers who are alienated from the majority of the population. They have never had a country of their own or a government in the places in which they lived. Their origin and identity are also quite controversial. As Roma do not have written history, the theories of their origin and migrations are mainly based on legends, linguistics and anthropology. Many theories about the origin of Roma hold that they came from Egypt and consequently that was the reason for giving them the name “gypsies”. Linguistic evidence, on the other hand, suggests that they are of diverse Indian origins that also followed the Indian caste system (Gresham et. al., 2001). What is known about Roma, however, is the fact that they first came in Europe about a thousand years ago to the Byzantine Empire. They travelled as extended families, sometimes reaching up to hundreds of people. Their migration movements here in Europe are marked by three significant events. The first one was in the end of 19^th century, after the gypsy slavery in Romania was abolished. The second one was when Roma were persecuted out of Yugoslavia in the 1960s and 1970s and the third one was just a decade ago when Roma had to flee because of the political and economic changes in Eastern Europe (Reyniers 1995, see Gresham et al., 2001). Nowadays, Roma can be found everywhere in Europe, from Finland to Greece and from Ireland to Russia (Tanner, 2005). The greatest numbers of Roma, however, are still concentrated in Central and Southeast Europe – 90% of Europe’s Roma population.

History of Roma in Bulgaria

In Bulgaria, Roma were first recorded to be present in the 13^th and the 14^th century. From their coming onwards, they were at the bottom of society and lived outside the boundaries of the residential areas. Later, during the World War II, Bulgaria allied with Germany and introduced many restrictive laws for Roma. In the capital, Roma were denied from central places, they couldn’t use public transport and were given smaller food rations than the rest of the population. Despite the many violations of Roma rights during that period, however, Bulgarians do not feel guilt for their actions because Bulgaria was maybe the only German ally who didn’t agree to submit its Jews and gypsies to concentration camps abroad. After the World War II, the Communist regime in Bulgaria established special policies for Roma which differed in their core idea and implementation. The communist regimes of postwar Eastern Europe approached the “Gypsy problem” from a different angle, viewing it as a social problem that could be solved by settling and proletarianizing the Roma (Cooper, 2001/2002). Firstly, Roma were depicted as lazy, irresponsible and lacking culture and those stereotypes were the main reason for the government to proclaim the struggle for their “full integration in the construction of socialism and their transformation from beggars and robbers into conscientious and good constructors of socialism” (SCCBCP, 1959; see Spirova, 2000). At the beginning of these policies, the government tried to disintegrate the already formed Roma communities and to scatter Roma families among Bulgarians. The chief goal with this policy was to permanently erase Roma identity and language and to blur all the differences between Roma and the rest of the population. The communist times for the Roma in Bulgaria were times of desegregation and then forced assimilation. In 1956, the national census was the last one that mentioned the Roma as a minority in Bulgaria (Spirova, 2000). After that, the Bulgarian authorities didn’t recognize the existence Roma community anymore. In addition, the Bulgarian word for “gypsy” - “ciganin”, was officially considered offending and inappropriate to use. This item of the assimilation policy was not really based on the concern of offending Roma or not but it mainly tried to forward the process of assimilation of Roma into the Bulgarian society. Even nowadays in Bulgaria, to call the Roma “gypsies” is considered politically incorrect.

Another item from the policies was the forcedly changing of names of the citizens from Romani and Turkish origin – also a form of erasing deviations from Bulgarian identity. In the late 1960s, the effectiveness of the already implemented policies was still not visible enough. Forced assimilation couldn’t erase effectively the lasting-for-centuries inequality between Roma and non-Roma. Although by the end of the 1980s most of the Roma had Bulgarian names, spoke Bulgarian and were officially called, “Bulgarians of Gypsy origin”, they were never considered de facto part of Bulgarian society by either the authorities or -even more- by the rest of the population (Eminov, 1997:119; see Spirova, 2000). Despite the widely-accepted notion of the failure of the communist assimilation policies, however, the life of this minority group under communism was pretty tolerable – they had access to housing, health care and jobs - things which they barely have access to nowadays. What is more, the communist period was maybe the only period in which Roma had the chance to study in mixed schools and to improve their social status equally with the rest of the people. The cost which Roma had to pay in order to be able to go to mixed schools was that they had to agree to conceal or deny their ethnic identity.

After the fall of Communism in 1989, the situation in Bulgaria sharply deteriorated for the whole population. Roma, however, were the first to feel the “wind of change” and to suffer from the worst economic situation. Roma were the first to get unemployed when factories closed down. What is more, after the agricultural cooperatives dissolved (agricultural cooperative was a communist idea of appropriating people’s land into one common regional cooperative and making everyone work on this land and later share the production equally), Roma also lost their agricultural jobs but at the same time they couldn’t appropriate any land for different reasons. With the advent of democracy, Roma unemployment reached much higher levels than the average for the country. In 1994, 76 per cent of working-age Roma were unemployed with the number reaching even 90 per cent in some regions, while only about 10-20 per cent held steady jobs (Tomova, I., 1995:71-78; see Spirova, 2000). According to data from 2004, today one in every five Roma has been unemployed for more than 10 years, while one in two have been unemployed for more than 5 years (Ministry of Labour and Social Policy 2004: 52; see Gounev, 2006). Due to the fact that the Constitution of Bulgaria forbids the establishment of political parties based on ethnic or religious grounds, Roma didn’t have any political party which could actively protect their interests. The mass poverty, as well as the state’s withdrawal from the problems of Roma created conditions that resulted in many Roma being involved in petty crimes outside their communities. Gradually, organized crime groups started to involve some Roma communities in various low-level forms of organized crime, such as drugs distribution, illegal timber and scrap metal trades, tax fraud schemes, usury, prostitution rings, and human trafficking (Ministry of Interior, 2002; see Gounev, 2006).

Current Situation of Roma

Although, for the majority of people Roma are seen as a unified group who are illiterate, depersonalized and lacking work discipline, the reality behind these ideas is a bit different. Roma throughout Europe represent a very heterogeneous group separated along religious, professional, linguistic and family lines. In Bulgaria alone there are more than fifty socially diverse Romani populations, talking approximately six different Roma dialects. But despite the differences within them, Roma arouse similar notions and ideas to the majority almost everywhere. According to the results of surveys on attitudes, stereotypes, prejudices and social distance toward ethnic and religious minorities in all the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, the Roma are the most rejected of all minority groups (Csepeli et al., 2000; see Csepeli, 2004). Formal and informal discrimination and racism are everyday practice in Bulgaria and statements such as “The Roma are genetically inclined to commit crimes”, “You can’t trust or rely on Gypsies” or “Gypsies are lazy and irresponsible”, have been conspicuously rising. Many people in Eastern European countries strongly support the thesis that Roma live solely on welfare and charity and because of the fact that this “technique” of theirs is working they do not bother to do anything else. On the other hand, development projects, which aim at building houses for Roma and helping them change the infrastructure of their slum-like segregated neighborhoods additionally cause friction and reluctance among the majority of Bulgarians who never had such governmental assistance for themselves. People cannot realize that until the country does not do anything for Roma and their way of living, it is impossible for them to be integrated. According to an official survey, Roma homes are on average inhabited by 6.9 persons (compared to 2.6 for a Bulgarian home), while only 34.7 per cent of those homes have main water supply and a sewerage system (in comparison to 66.1 per cent for the Bulgarians) (Official census, as cited in Tomova, I., 1995:68; see Spirova, 2000).

In many Bulgarian criminal reports Roma ethnicity and delinquency very often go hand in hand and this correlation is one the most frequently implied. It is a widely-known problem that police officers treat Roma by excessive use of force and sometimes even torture. But the facts and figures would also find it difficult to prove that Roma do not represent a big percentage of those who commit crimes. According to statistics of the Ministry of the Interior, Roma carries out 31.7 per cent of all crime in Bulgaria (Spirova, 2000). These findings, to some extent, illustrate how a classic ‘‘underclass’’ has become over-criminalized but, in essence, they bring up the question of agency, as they demonstrate the role and importance of law-enforcement institutions in enforcing and reinforcing a socially imposed exclusion and criminalization (Parenti 2000; see Gounev, 2006). Very often representatives of Eastern European countries attribute the bad reputation of the region and the country under question to the illegal Roma migrants to the West. Representatives from many Eastern European countries tend to believe that the international prestige of their homeland without the Roma citizens would be much higher (Csepeli, 2004).

The media in Bulgaria also attribute a lot for the negative attitude towards Roma by doing anti-Roma coverage and depictions which further influence the already long-established stereotypes. Recently, ultra-nationalistic parties in Bulgaria are also on their peak. They are gathering significant percentages of votes by emphasizing on Roma, the crime rates of their community and their alienation which will be impossible to overcome. Founded just two months before the Bulgarian parliamentary elections, the ultranationalist Ataka (Attack) party won 8.75 percent of the popular vote and is now controlling 21 seats in the legislature (Vassilev, 2006). Paradoxically, such attitudes are surfacing at the end of Bulgaria’s transition to democracy, which has so far enjoyed relatively peaceful interethnic relations (Gounev, 2006).

The social and demographic outlook of the Roma minorities which are different from those of the majority of the population are also factors which influence the negative attitudes towards Roma; the majority rarely have enough tolerance for the “otherness” of Roma and to their different lifestyle and values.Roma in Bulgaria are estimated to be around 577,000 and 600,000. The number of Roma on official papers is around 313 396. But the official data shouldn’t be taken for granted, because in national censuses many Roma hide their ethnic origin from fear that they could be discriminated against and stigmatized if they say they are Roma. The more interesting thing is that Bulgaria still does not officially recognize Roma as a minority group. Some have claimed that national minorities can only be ethnic groups that have a “mother country” (Spirova, 2000). This fact leaves Roma as an ethnic group, rather than a minority. Some have even argued against the use of the term minority in Bulgaria as a whole (Rudnikova, 1998; Spirova, 2000).

The high birth rate of Roma in Bulgaria is also a factor adding to the animosity of the majority of the population. The poor education of Roma, the lack of information among them, as well as the cultural practices of getting married at an early age are some of the influences for the high birth rate among them. Since 1992, while the overall population in Bulgaria dropped by 6.6%, the Roma population increased by 18.1%, according to the national census data (National Statistics Institute 2005b; see Gounev, 2006). The Bulgarian population, as a response, perceived a threat from Roma and their high birth rate and this further influenced the social intolerance among the two groups. The fear that the target group may pose a political danger to one's state or personal security may appear completely real to an individual yet have no objective basis (McIntosh, 1995). In particular, individuals who feel their cultural or political status is declining relative to a minority group in a society, may feel partially threatened and react, in a "status backlash," to restrict the rights of the threatening group (McIntosh, 1995). Such reactions can be either rational or irrational, although the prevalence of conspiracy theories in the media additionally feed this “Quondam Complex” and would rather influence the majority into irrational, psychologically motivated responses towards Roma. Thus, the more threatened one feels, the more probable it is that he is intolerant towards a minority group. Merton's typology (1976) on prejudice and social tolerance also shows that how one acts toward minorities is a friction not only of one's feelings toward the group but also of normative expectations and societal constraints (McIntosh, 1995). The facts and figures on the birth rate in Bulgaria are also quite worrisome. Bulgarian authorities are worried (although such worries are rarely expressed in public) by the fact that 60-70 % of all newborns in 2003 and 2004 came from the country's minority groups - Roma, Turks, etc. Such a tendency could reduce the share of Slavic Bulgarians to less than 60 percent of the total population by 2050 (Vassilev, 2006). Such data is showing that a seemingly inevitable demographic development could further the already existing ethno-religious tensions between the majority and the minority in Bulgaria.

Professor Zoltan Barany, an expert on gypsy issues, says that gypsies are certainly having trouble keeping in pace with change. ''If they aren't educated, they could become a population time-bomb. They'll have nothing to lose, and could create social havoc or a social-services crisis'' (Burke, 1995). Although such statements are easily used by human rights movements to emphasize the existence of negative attitudes and animosity towards Roma even among those in higher positions in society, it is a fact that integration policies are not working and if this doesn’t change, the predictions cannot be any positive. and at the same time they are internally divided in their own community. Roma themselves discourage intermarriage with other ethnic groups. Intermarriage is not only discouraged by Roma but also by the majority of the population in Bulgaria, as well as by the rest of the minority groups. According to the International Centre for Minority Studies and Inter-cultural Relations (ICMSIR) survey, Roma are viewed by all Bulgarian Christians, Turks, and Bulgarian Muslims as a lazy, irresponsible, untrustworthy, and highly homogeneous group with which nobody else should mix (ICMSIR, 1994:117; see Nenkova et al., 2002). Such factors make it even harder to come up with efficient policies and later, by the help of Roma, to try to implement them. Just as always, there is lack of state policies which aim at the integration of Roma. The problems are many and the discussion around them can go on forever. So, the rest of this research paper will mainly focus of educational policies and reforms done in education of Roma children and their integration into society.

Education of Roma: the case of Bulgaria

The education of Roma in Bulgaria is a long-living problem which seems quite difficult to tackle. Eighty per cent of the Roma in Bulgaria are uneducated and illiterate. From the rest (20%), there are 10% who have finished only primary school, 5% who have finished secondary school and the most striking percentage – 0.17% who have a university degree. The Roma illiteracy rate is 15 times higher than the rate for the non-Roma population (Ringold et al. 2003; see Gounev, 2006). More than 70% of the Roma in Bulgaria who go to school actually go to segregated schools and the rest who go to mixed schools are very often segregated into classes consisting only of Roma children. Another common practice in Bulgaria today is to put a big number of healthy Roma into specialized schools for children with mental disabilities or some kind of deviant behaviors. From these basic facts and statistics on the education of Roma it is clear that schooling is one of the main contributors for the exclusion of Roma from the Bulgarian society. The ineffective school policies for Roma keep them unprepared for the challenges of the labor market by keeping them uneducated and even functionally illiterate.

Roma and Education in the Past

The low level of literacy among Roma is a trend which has existed in Bulgaria for a long time. At the beginning of the century, the literacy rate among Bulgarian Roma was 3%, while the one among Bulgarians was 47% (Crowe, 1996:13; see Spirova, 2000). However, in the years 1901-1925 the literacy of Roma tripled due to the new policies which were implemented. During the communist period, Roma were also getting educated and going to mixed schools. Education in Bulgaria became compulsory first for eight years and later for twelve, as parents who didn’t insist their children to go to school were punished with fines or compulsory labour. The school was seen as the main socialization agent, tasked to erase any differences among children from different ethnic and religious communities and to transform them into ‘builders of the new socialist system’ (Csepeli, 2004). Roma parents were pressured to send their children to school but many parents also saw their children’s going to school as a bargain. The state offered free education, free teaching materials, free meals and clothing. What is more, many teachers were responsible for taking care of all their students both in and out of the school. They were paid extra hours for going to people’s homes by the end of the day and checking if children are there and if they did their work for the next day. Although Roma parents agreed to some extent to send their children to school, even during communist times, the educational ethic did not become part of the values of Roma. Any time when something ‘important’ happened - e.g. taking care of younger children in the family, visiting relatives, emergence of some temporary job or something else - the children were not sent to school (Csepeli, 2004). Children’s numerous absences from school further influenced their lagging behind. Additional factor was that many children did not have command of Bulgarian language which made them even more vulnerable to their own failure. There was a great need for pre-school classes but the linguistic barriers and the socio-linguistic codes which Roma children were unaware of were entirely neglected by those responsible for the educational system in Bulgaria. As a result, Roma children were often claimed to be retarded, and put in special schools for mentally disabled students. Attempts to reduce differences in social, educational and cultural status between Roma and non-Roma by coercion and avoiding Roma participation in the decision making process also had negative outcomes (Csepeli, 2004). Under the forced assimilation, many Roma developed dysfunctional strategies of coping such as ‘learned helplessness’ and striving for instant gratification when doing something which is beneficial for no one else but themselves.

The education of Roma today

The moment when Roma were segregated from the rest of the children (a process which was not forced but happened gradually), their educational level deteriorated significantly. Those who still went to mixed schools felt discriminated against and the extra attention which they needed in order to learn Bulgarian language before starting with real education was still not offered to them. The Roma children’s specific cultural and social characteristics like their skin colour, their mother tongue and dressing made them suffer from the poor treatment from both teachers and students (Mihailova, 1993:27-29; see Gouneva, 2000). As a result from, children developed negative attitudes towards schooling and were not stimulated anyhow to keep the good work. They were still absent from classes and additionally started getting involved in petty crimes, which again seemed good enough reasons for the specialized schools to enrol them as problematic children with minor mental retardations or deviant behaviour. The fact that these special schools also provided social assistance in the form of food, clothing, shoes, and free textbooks was an additional stimulus for some poor families to enroll their children in such schools (Nenkova, 2002). About 65% of the total number of children in institutions now are of Roma origins, even though the Roma make up only 8% of the country’s population, according to data from the National Statistical Institute (Nenkova, 2002). In addition, the children can not rely on the support of their family - a handicap to them for which the state school system never provided any compensation (Courthiades, 2000; see Gouneva, 2000). Interesting is also the fact that many Roma parents actually want to enroll their children in specialized schools, merely because they themselves have studied in such schools. What is more, as illiteracy among adult Roma is also very common, it deprives Roma children from having a good example to on with their studies.

Roma minority are often accused of not valuing education, and some Roma activists admit that education is “not a high priority” among the general population (Cooper, 2001/2002). This is, however, also very influenced by the high institutional discrimination which Roma in Bulgaria face no matter if they are educated or not. What is more, the aim to attract Roma teachers and thus make children in segregated schools feel more comfortable to learn Bulgarian through their own language is almost impossible to achieve because there are very few educated persons among the Roma. The cultural practice of Roma to marry earlier while still in school is also a factor which influences the educational careers especially of Roma girls. In addition, in Roma families children’s labour is often needed to contribute to the family income which is another reason to break up with school for both boys and girls. The poverty among Roma and the lack of money to buy their children books, clothes and sometimes even bus tickets are also quite important reasons for the reluctance of Roma parents to educate their children. Another important aspect for the failure of Roma in education is the fact that the teachers in the segregated Roma schools are very often those who were sent by the government as a punishment for not doing their job properly or teachers who already retired and continue teaching just for extra income.

New Educational Policies for Roma, Their Implementation and Effectiveness

The previously-stated social ills of Bulgarian society and the inability of the country to effectively integrate its minority groups, namely Roma, are visible from any aspect in the life of Roma. Schooling, however, seems to be the most damaged and ineffective domain for the integration of the minority group. Although the issue of quality education for minority children currently continues to be an area of activism exclusively by NGOs, the state has also taken some measures in this sphere of key importance to integration (Cohen et al., 2005).

The first and the utmost priority in the educational policies for Roma was the full integration of these children through desegregation of schools. Hopefully, Bulgarian government finally realized that you cannot integrate through segregation and that separate by coercion means unequal. But despite the criticism from 1989 on, for the segregated schools in Bulgaria, nothing seems to have changed. As of 1998, there were around 100 of these schools in Bulgaria (Nunev, 1998:17; see Spirova, 2000). Today, the outlook of the education in Bulgaria is still the same.

After the inability of local authorities to close down segregated schools and to make a shift towards desegregation, the Ministry of Education recommended at least levelling the educational standards in segregated schools to those of the educational system. There is still not much progress in this either.

The second most important policy which was considered was the prevention of the common practice to send healthy Roma children to special schools. The results from these policies are still to be seen, despite the fact that those policies were implemented a few years ago. The main excuse for the Bulgarian government is lack of appropriated funds to carry these programs out.

At a minor level, there have been important changes, some of which mark a good start for the integration of Roma. The provision of free textbooks for Roma and free breakfast every morning before school already exist in the educational practices. Roma in desegregated schools once again benefit from going to school and hopefully their parents would once again see this development as a bargain for schools covering some of the needs of their children. There are also some NGOs which provide Roma families with clothes and shoes for their children – a problem occurring to many Roma families especially in the winter season. Next to such subsidies, some schools are now providing transportation to the secondary schools and are farther trying to take the parents’ burden of spending money on their children’s education. Another development is the practice of social workers and teachers who personally visit Roma families in which there are children who are about to start their schooling and persuade the parents to send their children to school when school year starts. Very often social worker try to make sure that the parents will do what they promised, so they visit the families a few times before school starts. Although this practice may seem somehow pushy and invading families’ personal space, it proves useful in most of the cases. Another aspect of positive change is the special training of teachers, qualified and re-qualified for working in mixed classes. Nowadays, many teachers are sent on different educational programs aiming mainly at the integration of Roma in the classroom. The inclusion of Roma teachers in the curricula is also a new approach to the integration of Roma. But as the number of teachers from Roma background is really small, those Roma who work in the educational system are mainly assisting the real professionals. Additionally, there are preparatory Bulgarian language classes for Roma children (a year earlier before starting school) in which Roma assistants are the leading educational forces who prepare the children for their first year at school. Roma participation has been the "core" of the project since its conception - Roma are involved in setting the agenda and goals, and they will be involved in the oversight and monitoring process over the next 10 years (Tanner, 2005). Additionally, the educational system for Roma includes bilingual pre-school books, special primers for bilingual children and teachers’ manuals on the language education of Roma children and so on and so forth. According to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Bulgaria, the teaching of the Roma language and culture has been allowed since 1992, and in 1994, a special decree extended this right for children from the first through the eighth grade (Spirova, 2000). This change, however, seems to be bit inefficient and difficult to follow. By early 1997, only 500 students had expressed an interest in studying Romani and there were only 10 teachers qualified to do that (MFA, 1997:7; see Spirova, 2000). Apart from the fact that there are not enough Roma teachers who can teach Romani language, there is lack of interest from Roma parents to have their children study Romani. What is more, although the idea of a Romani alphabet is more than a century old, the first international Romani alphabet, or rather, a decision on how to use the alphabet in the various dialects, was adopted in 1990 (Liegeois, 1997:62; see Spirova, 2000). The dynamics of the various Roma dialects make the standardization of the Romani language virtually impossible (Liegeois, 1997:61; see Spirova, 2000). Only 37% of the Roma population in Europe speak Romani, the same holds true for the Roma in Bulgaria – only 50% speak Romani at home on a regular basis. In Bulgaria, Romani is defined as a “mother tongue” by the Constitution, and thus can be studied up to four hours per week as an elective course in schools (Marushiakova, et al., 1997:4; see Spirova, 2000). But with the inclusion of Romani in the curriculum and with studying Romani in school, some Roma children actually run the risk to study Bulgarian in a language which they are totally unaware of. In recent years, some elements of multicultural education in the field of music, literature and history have also been introduced. Today teachers receive special manuals from which they can also educate minority children on the subject of culture, customs and festivities of the Bulgarian macro- and micro-society. Such cultural classes aim at reinforcing Roma identity and instilling ethnic pride among Roma children. Another, maybe more important development for the education of Roma is the return of the night school for elderly Roma who want to become literate but did not use this opportunity when they had to.

Universities also did some changes in their curriculum with the hope that they can attract Roma people. For example, the American University in Bulgaria, sponsored by the Open Society Foundation, Sofia, which for several years funded approximately 30 Roma students to attend a one-year program at the university, where they studied English, computer skills and so forth (Max van der Stoel, 2000: 92; see Spirova 2000). The St. Kliment Ohridski Sofia University and the New Bulgarian University have established courses in Roma culture and folklore. Programs on Roma language and culture have been established in these universities with main goal to educate and train more Roma language school teachers. Additionally, as the freedom of the press in Bulgaria is relatively broad after 1989, there are many newspapers and magazines in Romani language. The problem with the printed press for Roma is that not all of the Roma who speak Romani can actually read in this language. What is more, not many Roma families can afford to buy such newspapers and magazines. The issue of minority broadcast media, which is maybe the more useful means of media for the Roma, is a grey area in the media legislation in Bulgaria (Nenkova, 2002). Although, the Turkish minority in Bulgaria managed to achieve news in Turkish language on national television, Roma are not that strongly represented in government and are far from achieving something similar. What is more, Roma lack support from their “mother country” on such minority issues.

To wrap up with, there are programs and policies which aim at the better integration of Roma in the educational system, but as you see the most important changes are dormant and the minor ones are not really well-considered for the disadvantages they carry.

Conclusion

In conclusion, this research paper showed that even today Roma in Bulgaria are discriminated against in all spheres of social life. At the same time, we can argue that the Bulgarian government throughout all these years did not really show interest in making better the conditions for Roma and did not combat their illiteracy and poverty so that they will cease being vulnerable to discrimination and prejudice. It is a fact that there are minor changes in the educational system which are for the benefit of Roma but these changes do not specially address the problem of Roma segregation. Poverty, unemployment, appalling living conditions, high crime rate, and maltreatment by the police and state authorities, illiteracy and school drop out rates are only some of the Roma’s problems (Nenkova, 2002). Today, even after Bulgaria acquired the long-awaited membership in the European Union and the Western World, it still has its Roma ghettos which resemble, or are maybe even worse, than the enclaves of the third world. The cycle of poverty, illiteracy and dependency in which the Roma are held, needs to be stopped, not only for the Roma but the entire Bulgarian society and European Community.

* the picture is taken from www.changemakers.net

References:

Burke, J. (1995). An anti-Gypsy fervor sweeps east Europe. Christian Science Monitor, 87(194).
Cohen, E. et al., (2005). Human Rights In Bulgaria In 2004. Annual Report of the Bulgarian Helsinki Committee.
Cooper, B. (2001/2002). “We Have No Martin Luther King” Eastern Europe’s Roma Minority. World Policy Journal.
Csepeli, G., & Simon, D. (2004). Construction of Roma Identity in Eastern and Central Europe: Perception and Self-identification. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 30(1), pp. 129 -150.
Gounev, P., & Bezlov, T. (2006). The Roma In Bulgaria's Criminal Justice

System: From Ethnic Profiling To Imprisonment. Critical Criminology: Center for the Study of Democracy, 14, pp. 313-338.

Gresham, D. et al., (2001). Origins and Divergence of the Roma (Gypsies). American Journal of Human Genetics, 69(6), pp. 1314 - 1331.
McIntosh, M. E., Iver, M. A. M., Abele, D. G., & Nolle, D. B. (1995). Minority Rights and Majority Rule: Ethnic Tolerance in Romania and Bulgaria. Social Forces, 73(3), pp. 939-968.
Nenkova et al., (2002). Human Rights In Bulgaria In 2002.

Annual report of the Bulgarian Helsinki Committee

Spirova, M. (2000). MINORITIES IN SOUTHEAST EUROPE Roma of Bulgaria. Center for Documentation and Information on Minorities in Europe - Southeast Europe (CEDIME-SE)
Tanner, A. (2005). The Roma of Eastern Europe: Still Searching for Inclusion

Finnish Directorate of Immigration

Vassilev, R. (2006). Bulgaria's Population Implosion. East European Quarterly: Ohio State University, XL(1)

a healthy mind in a healthy body

2007-04-04T03:05:00.000-07:00

I've always considered the maxim "a healthy mind in a healthy body" to be one of the few which hold true in any occasion...It seems, however, that I was a bit wrong...

When sports, money and education mix together the meaning of the maxim gets blurred and one of the three has to take a leading position before the other two.

The cause for this post is a problem which recently occurred in the media, namely a problem in many US universities and their craze about college sports and keeping the above-stated maxim up to date for most of their college students.

The problem is that by following the sports craze, many universities in the US forget their chief goal - to educate and to reach academic achievements.

Sports in American colleges are well embedded in their curriculum. Almost no other universities or colleges in the world have so many sports facilities or such a great variety of sports offered. Such diversity in sports makes the US colleges envied a lot.

I remember that when first came to my Dutch college, I was a bit disappointed from the fact that I had to choose taking sports which I never did before in my life - field hockey, basketball, swimming, and rowing. The sports in which I felt stronger at and willing to do (volleyball and athletics) were not much competitive and in the case of athletics - not offered at all.

But as I see now, being offered many sports at a higher than just a hobby level, can be also detrimental for some universities.

William Bowen, a former president of Princeton University, who's done research on college sports and educational values, says that sports in universities are educative but very often a too much focus on sports gets universities astray from their chief goal - to effectively educate at an academic level.

Many students who are accepted to universities because of their sports achievement continue to be good at their sport but do not pay much attention to their academic life.
Many of the students who've been accepted mainly because of their "healthy bodies" do not even happen to graduate university.

What is more, many alumni from certain universities give shit loads of money to support their ex-college team and in some universities in America you can also see that the richest universities (sponsored mainly for their sports achievements) have twice less numbers of books compared to the poorer, not that famous at sports, universities. The sports-oriented universities are also amongst the richest in the US and at the same time, the least focused on academic prosperity.

Sports in American universities bring a lot of money and without money not many university can offer its students everything needed in their academic environment. On the other hand, in order to be the best college in sports you need a lot of practice, good instructors and most of all a lot of spare time and devotion to the sport...In the cases in which this was achieved, education and academic training went to the background. The top priority shifts from the one pole to the other.

The problem with US colleges is that plenty of them have sold their soul to win.

"Individual institutions that decide to invest more money in their sports facilities and instructors in the hope of raising more funds or improving their applicant pools may be throwing good money after bad, and would be wiser to spend the money in other ways" the Knight Foundation Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics reported several years ago.

It is a lot easier for alums to rally around the basketball or football team than the classics department.

Very few are the colleges in the US coped to develop both sports at a professional level and a good academic reputation. Duke University is a good example, where basketball have enjoyed considerable success without violating the integrity of the institution.

Unfortunately, the institutions which can handle the combination of sport and education effectively without making compromises on behalf of the one are very few.

By reading about this trend the maxim which comes to my mind is that excess leads to regress and I start holding to the idea that sport in university has to be nothing much than a hobby, something which you do just to forget for an hour or so about all the academic load you have to finish by midnight :)

"The Suffering of the Migrant" Abdelmalek Sayad (preface by Pierre Bourdieu)

2007-03-27T03:48:00.000-07:00

What a nice book :) it didn't happen to me for a long time to be so impressed by a "social science a.k.a sociology" book.

At the beginning when people discussed the book I hadn't read it but what most of them commented on was that the book is too much exaggerated and that it is not possible immigrants to suffer mentally and physically at such a great extend. After all, immigration be it for studying, practicing profession or, as it is in the book, being a guest worker, is personal choice. What is more, motives for immigration are as numerous as people's music preferences.

Having in mind Bourdieu's scientific negativism about the social world, I thought that the focus of the book would be more or less also focused only on the negative aspect of immigration and thus maybe a bit exaggerated BUT after reading the book I was struck.

Sayad displayed immigrants' feelings and thoughts so objectively and precisely that I cannot say anything else than just admire his book. I think that the book holds true not only for legal guest immigrant workers or illegal ones - everyone who's been an immigrant for a longer period of time had at some point in time at least one of the thoughts revealed in the book. And only those who haven't experienced anything about living in a different country can say it is exaggerated or subjective.

This is my personal opinion...however...who knows? Maybe I have experienced the bitter part of immigration, despite coming as a legal foreign student :)

Sayad is an Algerian who lived for quite a long time in France and his story is actually about Algerian migrants in France...disturbing picture...surely a lot has to be done in France on migration and integration issues...

"How bitter you can be, my country, when one dreams of leaving you. And how desirable you are, oh France, before one knows you! All because our village is full of France and nothing but France- France is all people talk about. From our village, we have more people in France than in the village." A. Sayad

“No, they never explained to us what France was really like before we got to know it. We see them coming home, they are all well dressed, they bring back full suitcases, with money in their pockets, we see them spending that money without even thinking about it; they are handsome, they are fat” A. Sayad

“You come to France for a while, you act as though you were here for a while, but, year after year, then it’s five years, then ten years, then twenty years, and then you retire! When you add it up it’s your whole life.” A. Sayad

“None of the emigrants interviewed had attempted or had been tempted to try to find work in an Algerian town.” A. Sayad à funny ah?

“It’s not only the ‘behavior of a holiday-maker’ that the emigrant introduces into his group. He also introduces a great number of attitudes imbued with a calculating spirit and the economic and social individualism that goes with it, and these have more serious implications.” A. Sayad

“When we speak of the emigration of families, we are therefore dealing with assimilation, no matter what terms of euphemistic variants (adaptation, integration, insertion etc.) are used to designate that social reality.” A. Sayad

“What one vision of the phenomenon of immigration sees as a ‘cost’ can be seen as a ‘benefit’ by another and conversely.” A. Sayad

“When I am alone, I think about it all, I think everything over, I examine it from every point of view. I try to understand; I try to understand how things happen. Do the things that happen really depend on me, or do they happen by themselves?”

Migration Report for Bulgaria

2007-03-09T14:03:00.001-08:00

by Plamena Ivanova

Nowadays, the accelerated pace of globalization, the tendency of borderless regional integration organizations and the free movement of people, goods and commodities makes the issues on migration and integration policies more and more significant and worth discussing. Every country has its migration history and more or less every country has faced problems in dealing with this phenomenon. This report tries to look at the migration and integration trends in Bulgaria by briefly looking back at its history of migration and discussing in detail the current trends of migration in Bulgaria today.

Immigration and Internal Population Movements in Bulgaria:

Migration has become a significant point of discussion for Bulgaria a bit later in time, having in mind the political situation of the country before 1989. Like almost all ex-communist countries, Bulgaria had minor migration issues to deal with during communist time because of the fact that communist policies were quite restrictive on the movement of people, equally holding true for going abroad, moving within the country or visiting Bulgaria.

Historical Background: Migration and Ethnic Problems in Bulgaria before 1989:

Bulgaria’s first biggest migration movement was a mass exodus of Turkish population due to Bulgaria’s liberation from a 500-year of Ottoman yoke. Considerable numbers of Turkish people left the country because it was not under the rule of their own country anymore. Many Turks, however, stayed in Bulgaria because Bulgaria was the place in which they’ve always lived. Later in time, by the end of the communist regime, another mass movement of Turkish people out of Bulgaria took place. The migration of 218 000 Turks in 1989 was a result of the Bulgarian Government’s assimilation policies (Bobeva,1996; see UN Secretariat, Population Division). The so called “national revival” policies forced Turkish people to change their names to Christianized ones, denied them to observe Islamic holidays and forbade them to learn Turkish language in schools. The chauvinist “national revival” campaign still remains a shame for Bulgaria because it merely violated basic human rights. From 1990 to 1992, flows to Turkey declined but still accounted for 80% of all flows. Nevertheless, ethnic Turks still made 9.7% of the population of Bulgaria in 1992 (Bobeva, 1996; see UN Secretariat, 2002).

Current Trends of Bulgarian Immigration-Policies:

Nowadays, the fact that Bulgaria is already a member of the European Union changed the migration policies of the country to fit European policies of migration. Bulgaria implemented new international legal regulations, changed its domestic legislation, ratified international treaties and, quite important to say, ratified all twelve international legal instruments related to the fight against terrorism. The spheres which are the most unified to the European policies concern issues such as citizenship, civil registration, identity documents and policies on asylum seekers and refugees. Slightly different from the EU migration policies is the visa-free policy for citizens of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. According to recent data (March 2004), there are 2 530 foreigners in Bulgaria holding an application permit for permanent residence permit in Bulgaria (Poptodorova, 2004). Those residents are mostly coming from Macedonia (2000), Turkey (1685) and Russia (1270). In 2002 there were 7500 applications for Bulgarian citizenship, while in 2003 there were 14 306 (Poptodorova, 2004). Many Moldavians are also, and reasonably, claiming Bulgarian citizenship, mainly claiming their Bulgarian origin and self-awareness. The non-accredited Bulgarian community in Moldova speaks fluent Bulgarian language, observe Bulgarian traditions and send their children to the only Bulgarian-speaking University in Moldova.

Illegal Migration and Human Trafficking:

The geographical location of Bulgaria makes it a main country of transition for illegal migration and traffic of people. The illegal foreigners in Bulgaria are estimated to be around 10 000, but this number is estimated to be relatively low compared to other European countries (OECD, 2001; see UN Secretariat, 2002). However, a significant number of migrants do not stay in Bulgaria but proceed to other European countries (UN Secretariat, 2002). Migrants who use Bulgaria for international migration are mostly Iraqi, Pakistani and Algerians. A big number of transit migrants are also victims of human trafficking. Women are mainly the victims of this kind of trans-migration. In 2003 a law on human trafficking was adopted and its victims are now granted a special residence status. International cooperation is also one of the most useful ways for preventing human trafficking. Bulgaria cooperates with a number of countries on this issue. The UN also helps Bulgaria by developing anti-trafficking training modules for judges and prosecutors and encouraging the inclusion of this regional curriculum in the regular training in relevant institutions.

Refugees and Asylum Seekers:

Refugee issues and providing asylum for those who need are issues which Bulgaria is also concerned with. According to an assessment made by the European Commission in 1999, Bulgaria had made a substantial progress in implementing immigration and asylum regulations, even though its institutional capacity to manage migration remains weak (OECD, 2001; see UN Secretariat, 2002). One of the criteria of the EU for Bulgaria was also the changes that needed to be done in the facilities for asylum seekers and refugees. Nationals of Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, Iraq and Armenia are those who come in Bulgaria for asylum. Of the 1 750 decisions made in Bulgaria between 1995 and 1999, however, less than 600 resulted in the granting of refugee status and 290 in granting the humanitarian status (UNHCR, 2000).

Modern Migration and Investment:

“Modern migration” is the so called phenomenon recently seen in Bulgaria (and countries similar to it) in which people with money migrate to places in which the local population are relatively poor and where they can have a life which they would difficultly find or even afford in their own country. This trend for Bulgaria is mainly followed by people coming from Great Britain. There are whole villages in the mountains in which the bigger percentage of the houses belongs to Englishmen. An article in Independent says that the English who decide to immigrate permanently in Bulgaria are people who want to start a new way of living in a place where “a pint of beer costs 40 cents and one can buy an apartment for 25 000 pounds”. The good part from this type of immigration is the fact that the places of “foreign demand” are really prospering from this type of migrants – there are more investments and the payment in these particular villages has grown. Recently, Bulgaria is also making a profit from a great foreign interest to invest in the country and thus there is another reason for immigrating in the country. There are quite a big number of foreign factories (Greece and Turkey) whose leaders are also foreigners, companies working in the tourist field from Germany and Spain, and other more specialized companies. Such companies open many working places for Bulgarians and thus help the economic growth.

Emigration and Movements of People out of Bulgaria:

Causes for Emigration and Main Destinations for Bulgarians:

In spite of the growing favorable economic conditions in the country, the emigration from Bulgaria is also growing. After 40 years of restrictions on free movement till 1989, a big wave of Bulgarian migrants flew out of the country. This trend, however, got normalized quite fast. At the beginning the main reasons for emigration were mainly political and ethnic (the exodus of Turks from Bulgaria). But the main reason for Bulgarian people to migrate now to other countries is the classical one - leaving for economic reasons. Bulgarians are immigrating to countries with higher living standards and very often they have only vague ideas of how they are going to be successful. Every year around 22 000 people leave Bulgaria (Poptodorova, 2004). And according to data from the National Institute for Statistics, during the past eight years 196 000 Bulgarians emigrated and 19 000 have returned (Poptodorova, 2004). The most preferable destination for Bulgarians is Germany (23%), followed by the USA (19%) – mostly Chicago (60 000 BG), Greece (8%), Spain (8%), Great Britain (6%), Italy (6%), Canada (5%) and France (4%). Immigration rate for Central and Eastern European countries is almost negligible. The data of the Agency for the Bulgarians (2001) shows that there are 4 million Bulgarians living abroad (the population of Bulgaria at the moment is less than 8 million) (Poptodorova, 2004). A sociological research done in Bulgaria in 2001 showed that 8% of the population between 15 and 60 year-old were potential emigrants who would like to leave. On the other hand, those who think they will not travel or go out of the country represent 70% of the population. 47% per cent of the emigrants leave the country to cope with financial problems, while only 5% leave in order to become better in their professional field and 4% emigrate to finish education abroad. When people emigrate to work or practice their profession the country of destination is Germany, other countries considered favorable for solving financial problems are Greece, Spain, England and Italy. An interesting fact, however, is that there are almost no remittances going in Bulgaria. Turkey, Russia and Morocco are among the highest recipients of formal remittances, given their migration rates, while Pakistan, Indonesia, Bulgaria and Romania record only small remittances despite high net out migration levels (Lucas R., 2005).

Ethnic Emigration:

The ethnic composition of the emigrants reflects the ethnic composition of the country: around 80% Bulgarian, 12% Turkish and 4% Roma. Recently, the Migration Department of Bulgaria’s Police in collaboration with Italian National Police discovered and ceased the existence of a channel for taking Bulgarian Roma children between 6 and 12 year-old out of Bulgaria and bringing them to Italy to beg on the streets. The worst part of the story was that the grown-ups involved in this trafficking were relatives of the children or friends of their parents.

Bilateral Agreements:

In the situation of Bulgaria bilateral agreements for exchange of labor force seem to be the most reasonable, legal and effective way for controlling migration. No much ago, Bulgarian university students received the chance to go to the USA and do different seasonal work there through summer student work programs that have been functioning with the United States. Each year 5 000 to 6 000 Bulgarian students go to the United Stated for various kinds of seasonal work (Poptodorova, 2004). The oldest bilateral agreement for exchange of labor was between Switzerland and Italy (1964). Many bilateral agreement were entered by western European countries with the former communist countries, notably Germany (with the Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia and Romania), Greece (with Bulgaria and Albania), Spain (with Poland and Romania), France (with Poland), and Italy (with Albania) (Abella, 2006). Spain has concluded eight bilateral agreements: Morocco (1999), Colombia, Ecuador and the Dominican Republic (2001), Romania and Poland (2002) and Guinea-Bissau (2003) and Bulgaria (Abella, 2006).

Brain Drain:

Every country which can be characterized with relatively big outward movements of migrants experiences social “brain drain”. Bulgaria, as a country with constant emigration tendencies also faces the spell of brain-drainage. Numbers of intellectuals in the developing Eastern European countries (Bulgaria included) are more and more migrating to countries in which they will have better opportunities and better appreciation for their potential. The problem with intellectuals leaving their countries is not the most important factor to think about because developing your own potential at a better place is more than good for sciences. Problems occur, however, when those intellectuals decide to stay where they are and not go back to their come countries. The reasons for intellectuals are many and as diverse as the reasons everyone else who decides to migrate. Better opportunities for research, better payment or acceptance to innovative ideas are pull factors for migration, while career limitations, underestimation and declining prestige of certain spheres are very often main push factors for migration of intellectuals. According to a sociological study, the brain drain from Bulgaria is intensifying. The fields that are principally affected are the medical sciences, biology, chemistry, the technical sciences, and computer software (Vizi E., 1993). 70% of the scientists who leave their own countries have no intention of returning home. Bulgaria has already lost many scientists to the brain drain, and is still losing about 20 000 every year, mostly to Germany, Italy, France, and England (Vizi E., 1993).

Conclusion:

This report tried to show the tendencies at work in Bulgaria on both two sides of the migration process. To conclude with, the report reveals both the progress Bulgaria made on its migration policies and the inability of the country to deal with some emigration issues, the inability of the country to keep down those emigrating.

References:

Abella, M. (2006). Policies And Best Practices For Management Of Temporary Migration. International Symposium On International Migration And Development.

Lucas, R. E. (2005). International Migration Regimes and Economic Development. Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Martin, P. (2006). Managing Labor Migration: Temporary Worker Programmes For The 21st Century. International Symposium On International Migration And Development.

Poptodorova, E. (2004). Bulgaria’s Migration Policy. Mediterranean Quarterly.

Secretariat, U. N. (2002). International Migration from Countries with Economies in Transition : 1980-1999. Department of Economic and Social Affairs.

Vizi, E. S. (1993). Reversing the Brain Drain from Eastern European Countries: The “Push” and “Pull” Factors. !rwmozogy in society, 15, 101-109.

speech on globalization

2007-03-05T10:20:00.000-08:00

Today I am going to write about globalization and the way it affects people all over the world.

I am glad that I feel like writing on this topic because I believe that we have the potential to work for a change and to contribute considerably for people’s well-being.

My main goal with this piece of writing is to put across a message which has been often ignored by those who are now capable of making a difference, merely because the statement that this message supports is anything else but advantageous for those individuals.

One of the most thorough definitions of globalization says that it is a historical process involving a fundamental shift or transformation in the spatial scale of human social organization that links distant communities and expands the reach of power relations across regions and continents.

Or just to simplify this definition - Globalization represents the widening, deepening and speeding up of worldwide interconnectedness.

Proponents of globalization say that it helps developing nations "catch up" with industrialized nations much faster through access to free markets, increased employment and technological advances.

But such attributions to globalization reveal many cracks and fissures beneath their high-gloss surface.

The idea of interconnectedness and involvement to any single state in the world system may sound quite liberal but what this idea actually brings about seems to be anything else but liberal.

There are too many facts and too much evidence that prevent the idea of globalization from keeping its shiny outlook.

The statement I am about to argue today is that globalization is a self-serving myth or ideology which reinforces world inequality.

First, I would like to focus on the fact that the noble goals of globalization such as combating poverty and hunger by giving access to global markets to the developing countries is working exactly in the opposite direction.

Second, I will argue about the harmful effects of globalization by giving you an example with the case of Tanzania.

And third, I will talk about the fact that globalization is just reinforcing Western hegemony on a world scale.

So, now I start with one of the biggest problems of our age, namely hunger.

Never before in our human history we have been so rich and at the same time so poor;

so overwhelmed with products and so much lacking basic food that contributes for our survival.

The causes of hunger are many.

But globalization certainly has a big share in this problem.

Globalization and the integration of developing countries into the global market allow products from those countries to enter our never-having-enough societies and at the same time leave people from those countries die from hunger.

Hunger in the Third World countries is not caused by underproduction or less fertile soil in those regions.

Hunger in the developing countries is caused by our Western fuss of when we go shopping to be able to choose between 7 types of African peaches, 15 types of fish coming straight from Lake Victoria and 20 types of rice produced in India, Bangladesh and China.

Hunger in the Third World countries is caused by the artificial needs we have obtained due to globalization and the accessibility of everything we would like to have access to.

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that although there is enough grain alone to provide everyone in the world with 3600 calories a day (just to clarify the UN’s recommended minimum intake per day is 1200 calories) there are still over 800 million hungry people.

Furthermore, critics note that the Third World, where the majority of starving people are found, produces much of the world’s food, while those who consume most of it are located in the Western World.

Amartya Sen’s pioneering book called Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation shows results from an empirical research work on the causes of famine which conclude that hunger is due to people not having enough to eat, rather than there not being enough to eat.

One of the main reasons for those people to be hungry is globalization.

The responsibility for people not having enough to eat is of those who want to make a greater profit from supplying us with a huge variety of extremely cheap imported products. The responsibility of growing inequality among people can be reasonably attributed to globalization.

One of the best documentaries ever called “Darwin’s Nightmare” clearly shows the effects of globalization on the poor countries by focusing on Tanzania.

I have to admit that the documentary is striking.

No other movie shows so clearly the devastating effects of globalization.

The fact that there are basically no borders at a global level makes the rich –richer and the poorest become even poorer.

Tanzania has one of the biggest natural fish resources, the Lake Victoria.

Every day Tanzania exports fish which feeds 2 million people in Western Europe, while at the same there are 8 million people in that same Tanzania who are dying from hunger.

This is just unacceptable my dear friends.

This is just another proof of the dehumanization of humanity.

This is just the real face of globalization and the real problems it brings about.

Some of you may ask yourselves about the actions that the rich Western countries take to prevent the ongoing inequality phenomenon.

My dear friends, the countries we are living in, the rich countries, do not care about world inequality as long as they are leading world figures.

What is more distressing, however, is the fact that the easiest way to keep on top is to be a proponent of the ideas of globalization and to make use of them.

Globalization is the greatest tool for preserving world inequality.

A clear example is the fact that one of the biggest resources for increasing Western power and wealth are the big Western companies situated in Third World countries.

These companies use the filthy excuse of increasing employment by expanding their businesses, but all they do is making huge profits from the Third World workers whom they pay the equivalent of 2 US dollars per day.

One contemporary anti-globalists (call her even neo-Marxist as you like), the Canadian scholar Naomi Klein, writes in one of her books that

the global village we live in is a village where some multinationals, far from leveling the global paying field with jobs and technology for all, are in a process of mining the planet’s poorest back country for unimaginable profits.

The travels of Nike sneakers have been traced back to the abusive sweatshops of Vietnam, Barbie's little outfits back to the child labourers of Sumatra,

Starbucks' lattes to the sun-scorched coffee fields of Guatemala,

and Shell's oil back to the polluted and impoverished villages of the Niger Delta.

This is global village, my dear friends, is also the village where bill Gates lives,

amassing a fortune of 55 billion while a third of his workforce is classified as temporary workers, many of whom are seventeen-year old girls living in Third World countries who assemble CD-ROM drives in the great number IBM sweatshops in those regions.

This is my dear friends, the result of globalization.

This is, my dear friends, the representation of the words of the Indonesian writer Mangunwijaya who wrote that

“We might not see things yet on the surface, but underground, it’s already on fire”

Dear friends, let us hope that this fire will soon be extinguished from its core;

References (APA style):

Baylis, J., & Smith, S. (2005). The Globalization of World Politics: An Introduction to International Relations (3rd ed.). New York: Oxford University Press Inc. [textbook]

Klein, N. (2000). No Logo. Great Britain: Flamingo. [book]

Sauper, H. (Writer) (2004). Darwin's Nightmare. In E. Mauriat (Producer). France. [documentary]

Sen, A. (1981). Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation Oxford: Clarendon Press. [book]

Beauty * Charles Baudelair

2007-03-05T10:12:00.001-08:00

Conceive me as a dream of stone:
my breast, where mortals come to grief,
is made to prompt all poets' love,
mute and noble as matter itself.

With snow for flesh, with ice for heart,
I sit on high, an unguessed sphinx
begrudging acts that alter forms;
I never laugh, I never weep.

In studious awe the poets brood
before my monumental pose
aped from the proudest pedestal,
and to bind these docile lovers fast
I freeze the world in a perfect mirror:

The timeless light of my wide eyes.

Women's roles in the Household: Popular Press Depictions of gender roles in the USA (1870-1960)

2007-03-05T07:42:00.000-08:00

by Plamena Ivanova

Social constructions of womanhood and manhood, namely differences between men and women, has been a widely-discussed issue since time immemorial. At least once in our life we have witnessed stereotyping or experienced expectations that concern gender at their core. Women are perceived somehow always weaker than men, incapable of doing the same things and even sometimes having less brain potential. As time passes, however, women have shown that they are as capable as men. Although women prove themselves every single day, we can still see some scars of gender stereotyping in our society. We can still detect some old-times legacy about gender.

If we try to compare modern women with women in the thirties, we will see a big progress in woman’s emancipation. In almost any previously taboo for women sphere, we will see development. But will we see such great difference in women’s roles if we compare the 1870s and 1960s?

This small paper examines gender in the United States by focusing on women’s roles between 1870 and 1960. Sources for the analysis is the contemporary popular press and culture. These sources provide windows into society, give a glimpse on the social ideas, norms and "real" lives.

Nowadays, household tasks and home management concern everyone in a family; men are equally responsible with their female counterparts for the management of their house.

In the 19^th through mid 20^th century, household tasks were not equally distributed. All spheres in everyday life were strictly polarized. Men and women had tasks which were strictly determined by their sex. Women were, for example, primarily responsible for the home. To be the perfect housewife was top priority throughout the entire popular press and popular culture. To be a housewife was one of the few things which a woman could be, but this was also a thing considered of greatest importance for social prosperity. As one of the mottos of a Gilded Age magazine put it, “The housewife makes the home, and the home makes the nation.” [1]

Later in the 1930s advertisements didn’t show very different idea about women’s roles from that of the 1880s. Women were depicted in almost all of the cases surveyed in their homes doing happily some kind of chore. In the 1950, women’s magazines such as “Ladies Home Journal” and “Good Housekeeping” were still having a large circulation. They were very influential for building the image of the "modern" woman. This image was that of the housewife. From some articles published we can deduct that women’s role as housewife was still leading.

What made popular culture during that period different from pop culture in the 1880s was the stress on the idea that has to be not only a housewife but also the "perfect" one. All the tasks a housewife was supposed to do had to fit perfectly in time, to be well considered and brilliantly executed. The meals had to be served hot exactly when the man of the house came back from work, and he should not wait a minute longer. Products which had to be bought had to be deliberated on for hours, even the filling in of the salt and pepper shakers had to be done perfectly on time.[2]

Were women influenced by such articles and advertisements? Did they, in other words, strive for "perfectionism"? The “Good Housekeeping” magazine offered a question-box for its readers and the people there (mostly women) asked about everything they were interested in. A question-box in one of the issues of the magazine in 1944 makes us really believe that women were striving for perfection. The questions asked concerned housekeeping, cooking and serving in such a detailed way that women in the 40's seemed to be really obsessed with knowing in detail the household tasks they were doing. Questions asked in those question-boxes calories of certain foods, appropriate ways of serving certain vegetables, appropriate ways of preserving vitamins etc. [3]

The argument that women were perfectionists about their household routine by judging from the popular press can be unreliable. Women’s real manner of executing their tasks might have not been so perfection-oriented. Maybe the editors of the women’s magazines published only the questions concerning perfect catering at home in order to establish an example of how women should do their job. Maybe that’s how society wanted to see women; that was the widely-accepted idea.

"Perfect" housekeeping might not have been the entire truth about women’s roles, but housekeeping was for sure their greatest domain. The popular press introduced this fact as something which was totally enough and worth being proud of. All the virtues and prudence came from the home so housewives, as being guardians and caretaker of the home, were considered the ones who possessed those virtues and values and who had one of the most significant roles in society.

The popular press was uncompromising about the women who dared to deviate from this social norm – mere failures.

“Whenever a woman’s house shall be…her delight, she will not be a victim of ennui or vanity”. [4]

This statement made in an article in 1930 and it clearly showed people’s perceptions of the importance that a woman should be a housewife and the ruin she turns into if she doesn’t comply with that norm. In the mid 19^th century this situation was more or less the same – bad and incompetent housewives were made fun of and their image was ridiculed.

But if the household was the work of the 18^th and mid 19^th century woman, where was she spending her leisure time? What was she doing when she had no household chores to worry about? It is undisputable fact that women had free time during the period from 1870s to 1960s, especially with the advent of the new household appliances, and the popular culture and press talked about this leisure time.

The most striking about this period was that women’s free time was almost always within the house, if it by some chance wasn’t spend at home - leisure time was almost always connected either with taking care of children or being companion to husbands.

Chicago World’s Fair in 1893, for example, was a place from which you can easily get a clear idea about ongoing popular culture at that time. It was a place that showed the progress done in any human sphere. It was also a place in which gender roles and shared beliefs could be clearly detected because they were clearly framed.

Women, as inevitable part of society, were participants in this fair; they were visitors as well as organizers. They had their own building which represented their progress and development.

The Woman’s Building was dedicated to the woman and her work. The most interesting and important things about this building were the items displayed there, the activities with which women were occupying their time. “Indeed, much of the work displayed by female artists-needle work and furniture ornamented with images of natural fecundity and domestic peace-confirms the view of the containment of women’s creativity within a geography of separate spheres.” [5]

This sphere, as we can see, was the household. The World’s Fair shows us that women were not always staying at home, they also participated in important cultural events. The buildings constructed especially for them, however, showed that women’s field for activity and creativity was relegated to the home.

Even when enjoying their leisure time, women were inseparably connected to their household. This is seen, for instance, in a 1920s, advertising campaign of the American Laundry Machinery company. The campaign stressed the time saved by sending the family washing to a commercial laundry, and described the activities women might choose in this free time. Each ad usually included three or more illustrated testimonials in which women described the particular joys of their expanded leisure. [6] The most common activities turned out to be reading, spending more time with their children, sewing, home decoration and music.

All of these tasks allude to the sacred domain of the household. Some years later, between 1926 and 1928, another advertising campaign placed an even heavier emphasis on “more time to devote to your children” or “companionship with your children” as the most desirable benefit. [7] These surveys support the idea that advertisers then didn’t choose randomly the depiction of women either reading to their children or introducing them (especially if the child was a girl) to the household tasks from an early age. These were the activities women were occupied with during their leisure time.

This evidence could support the argument of Ruth Schwartz Cowan and others that new theories of child care had persuaded many women simply to shift their time from house maintenance to child nurture. [8]

Another important leisure-time "task" for women was to be companions to their husbands in the activities the men had decided to do. Women were advised by the magazines they read to finish their domestic chores faster by time-saving appliances and use their free time to being better housewives. To be a good wife equaled accompanying your husband wherever he decided to spend his free time. According to some articles in the McCall’s magazine from1959, women’s leisure time was normally connected with the plans of their husbands. According to the magazines, it was a pleasure to use up the free time you obtain in going somewhere with your counterpart. Thus, couples could do different things together and could enjoy their free time. The activities which married couples were supposed to do in their free time were either hunting or fishing, or just working together on the man’s tasks. [9]

The most striking thing about women’s free time and the things they wished to do was that no woman mentioned career in any of the testimonials from the survey of American Laundry Machinery. Women and career never existed together in the magazine articles in 1940-1960 either. It is true that there were some women who had jobs or who were having a “career” outside their homes, but the numbers of these women were far from equal compared to those of men. Most of the women living in the period from 1880 to 1960 built careers within their houses. Being a housewife was a job, an occupation and a career to them.

To be a good housewife and a good manager of your household was made by advertisers far more admirable job than any other occupation which women might have outside their home. In the 1930s’ advertising, homemaking was exalted as a career. [10] Every time advertisers wanted to dignify housework and show how important it was for women to build a career within their house, they resorted to business analogies.

There were many ads which stationed the housewife at the controls of a domestic communications center, and appended prestigious initials after her name in the same way that a professional man might add LL.D or M.D. [11]

American households were the businesses which were managed by women. When women were depicted in advertisements as planning their finances or paying bills, they were related to business executives and managers. The popular press was working as hard as possible to create a pleasing image of women’s roles in the household and to keep them in their realm, or maybe women were those not able to see themselves outside their homes, and the press was just showing this inability through ads and articles?

An article from the “Ladies’ Home Journal” in 1949, however, shows that there were women who doubted the self-fulfillment of their lives and the usefulness of the fact that they’d never been anything else but housewives. Such statements about wasted life within the home, unachieved career dreams were easily refuted by the eloquence of the people writing the articles for the women’s magazines. The disturbing statement that a housewife was always dependent on her husband to support her because of the fact that housewives were never ever in their lives able to earn any money was easily refuted by the answer that women were just fulfilling their moral obligations never to do anything for money.

Then to the statement that women felt inferiority complexes when they had to say or write down their occupation and they cannot write anything else except from occupation-housewife, the articles blamed women themselves for the fact that they perceived all the tasks they do as mere housekeeping.

A contemporary author claimed, for instance, that “The trouble with you-I said-is that you have to find one word to cover a dozen occupations all of which you follow expertly and all more or less simultaneously. You might write – business manager, cook, nurse, chauffeur, dress maker, interior decorator, accountant, caterer, teacher, private secretary- or just put down ‘philanthropist’ ”. [12]

These kind of articles suggested that, being a housewife, was the greatest, most humane, occupation. The home was the place where a woman could build the image of a prosperous person. Woman’s kingdom was her home, there she was not only responsible for everything, but she was also the one who had the last word to say about what had to be done and how. As another article from Haprer’s Bazaar in 1944 put it, “the time women have felt their own power in their own kingdoms they will know that they have never been slaves, except to a mistaken idea…” [13]

Women were those who had the right to decide which cereal their children should eat, they were the ones to decide what the three-meal menu for the day would be. Women managed household finances and had the right to vote for the best toothpaste.

When women were reading the newspapers about their domain they couldn’t feel anything else but pride about their achievements in society, about the career which they were able to establish within their homes. These were the messages which the popular press put across to its female readers. Those were the widely-accepted ideas about women in the 18^th century and in the mid 19^thcentury and their roles in society.

According to contemporary newspapers and magazines, women were independent and self-reliant. It is another point of discussion that today we can also read in the available sources from that time that women were advised to consider together with their husbands what to buy and how to plan all expenses conveniently[14], or that men used to reprimand their wives in it the same magazines and to teach them how to raise their children and to manage their household. [15] We can see in some advertisements husbands who stop-watched their wives to see how much time it takes them to clean with the new detergent they used, we can see that whenever a man was reading a newspaper at home on an advertisement, women were almost always depicted sitting behind and peeping.

To conclude, women’s roles in America in the period from 1870s to 1960s didn't fundamentally change. Sources like newspapers, advertisements and World Fairs reveal that women’s role in the household, and the widely-accepted idea of the home being their domain of job realization, did not change for almost a hundred years. Women were depicted and supposed to be best at being companions to husbands and children, successful in building a career within their homes, and extremely devoted to their household tasks. Women were just depicted as “philanthropies”.

Today we complain about women’s roles in society and their being neglected and under appreciated. But if we go back to the 30s and try to live the life which women used to live then, we will realize that the progress which women made from then on was a lot.

This paper shows that social norms and ideas doesn’t change for a day, sometimes even hundreds of years are not enough. It is our responsibility to preserve the already achieved goals and to expand progress until we reach absolute equality between the two genders.

P.S. What is more, judging by today's popular press and culture from the pictures below, we can see that gender roles are really changed (this time, however, not in the benefit of men) :) :) :)

[1] David Scobey, What Shall We Do With Our Walls? The Philadelphia Centennial and the Meaning of Household Design, pp. 91

[2] Grace L. Pennok, Starting from Scratch, pp.147 “We asked Ginger if she ever kept Ted waiting because she forgot to put in the roast on time”; “Ted comes home about 5:30 p.m., so 4:30 is Ginger’s deadline for beginning the evening meal. She sets the table first so she’s sure not to forget things like filling the salt and pepper shakers”

Dorothy Fisher, Housekeeping Needn’t be Dull, pp. 150 “…decide what you have to spend, go ahead and do the buying-and then dismiss the whole matter of purchases from your mind for days, for weeks, for months. Don’t ever step into a shop “just to look around.””

[3] Dr. Carl Sherwin, The Question-Box, pp. 152 “Is honey more digestible than cane sugar?”; “What is the calorie value of apple butter? Of potato chips?”

[4] David Scobey, What Shall We Do With Our Walls? The Philadelphia Centennial and the Meaning of Household Design, pp. 115

[5] David Scobey, What Shall We Do With Our Walls? The Philadelphia Centennial and the Meaning of Household Design, pp. 96 – Tribune Guide,45

[6] Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream Making Way for Modernity, 1920-1940, pp. 171-172

[7] Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream Making Way for Modernity, 1920-1940, pp. 171-172

[8] Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream Making Way for Modernity, 1920-1940, pp. 171-172

[9] Selma Robinson, 103 Women Sound Off!, pp.186-187, “Their lives are lives of shared responsibilities and fun. Some fish and hunt with their husbands. Some are in business with them or pitch in when help is needed.”; “For a farmer’s wife like me, there is nothing more wonderful than following your husband on another tractor and feeling you are doing something together.”

[10] Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream Making Way for Modernity, 1920-1940, pp. 171

[11] Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream Making Way for Modernity, 1920-1940, pp. 169

[12] Dorothy Thompson, Occupation Housewife, pp.161

[13] M. F. K. Fischer, The Lively Art of Eating, pp. 160

[14] Dorothy Fisher, Housekeeping Needn’t Be Dull, pp.150

[15] Robert Knowlton, Your Wife Has an Easy Racket, pp. 170

Cited Works:

Fisher, Dorothy C. “Housekeeping Need Not Be Dull”. Ladies’ Home Journal (October, 1941). Walker, Nancy A. Women's Magazines,1940-1960 Gender Roles and the Popular Press, (Boston: Bedford, 1998).

Fisher, M. K. F. “The Lively Art of Eating”. Harper’s Bazaar (November,1944). Walker, Nancy A. Women's Magazines,1940-1960 Gender Roles and the Popular Press, (Boston: Bedford, 1998).

Wilder, Gene. Magic of the White City the World's Fair of 1893.(2005. Mark Bussler).[film]

Jones, Paul. “Is There a Plot against Women?”. Ladies’ Home Journal (July, 1954).

Walker, Nancy A. Women's Magazines,1940-1960 Gender Roles and the Popular Press, (Boston: Bedford, 1998).

Knowlton, Robert J. “Your Wife Has an Easy Racket!”. American Magazine (November, 1951). Walker, Nancy A. Women's Magazines,1940-1960 Gender Roles and the Popular Press, (Boston: Bedford, 1998).

Marchand, Roland. Advertising the American Dream Making Way for Modernity, 1920-1940. (Los Angeles: University of California Press; 1985).

Pennock, Grace L., “Starting From Scratch”. Ladies’ Home Journal (April, 1940). Walker, Nancy A. Women's Magazines,1940-1960 Gender Roles and the Popular Press, (Boston: Bedford, 1998).

Robinson, Selma. “103 Women Sound Off”. McCall’s (February, 1959). Walker, Nancy A. Women's Magazines,1940-1960 Gender Roles and the Popular Press, (Boston: Bedford, 1998).

Scobey, David. “What Shall We Do with Our Walls? The Philadelphia Centennial and the Meaning of Household Design”. Rydell Robert W.,Gwinn Nancy, Gilbert James B. Fair Representations: World's Fairs and the Modern World (Ed. Robert W. Rydell & Nancy Gwinn. Amsterdam: Amsterdam VU University Press, 1994).

Sherwin, Carl P. “The Question Box”. Good Housekeeping (January, 1944). Walker, Nancy A. Women's Magazines,1940-1960 Gender Roles and the Popular Press, (Boston: Bedford, 1998).

Thompson, Dorothy. “Occupation-Housewife”. Ladies’ Home Journal (March, 1949). Walker, Nancy A. Women's Magazines,1940-1960 Gender Roles and the Popular Press, (Boston: Bedford, 1998).

Whitbread, Jane and Cadden, Vivian. “Granny’s on the Pan”. Redbook (November, 1951). Walker, Nancy A. Women's Magazines,1940-1960 Gender Roles and the Popular Press, (Boston: Bedford, 1998).

it is all good and it will always be

2007-02-27T20:37:00.000-08:00

Today I am about to write about high expectations and why they are needed...
Why, you may think, would someone always have to raise the bar when he has something which maybe he can be pretty satisfied with?

It is not that easy guys...the bar is rising on its own...Your high expectations should not change ...because you are already there...you shouldn't go down...on the contrary...if you do not receive what you would like to...just learn to live with it and accept it... It is already an achievement if you had someone reached your bar and the most important - you remember that this happened...

The topic today is friendship and why it is so difficult to achieve? It is...and it has always been...

And people's ideas about friendship are different - in the end friendship is just a mere probe of egoism...egoism for your own self to know that in the end you have someone always there for you...a mere probe of egoism because egoistic people always think about themselves in the end...some earlier than expected, others later in time...all of us are egoists but some of us are egoists in the altruistic way i.e. deprive themselves from many things they would love to do at a certain moment just for the egoistic feeling that if they do not do them now, later in time they will be happier (personal happiness - another form of egoism)...a minor minor almost insignificant example...sometimes we feel like shouting at the world and the people in it and telling them that what they are doing is not the way it has to be...but by the end you think "who am I to judge people"...they know better for themselves and by trying and disappointing a few they better learn than if you shout it at them and then just disappear from their lives...It is not the way it has to be...because egoism rules...and the more I hope I am wrong, the more I see I am not...

So about friendship, it is difficult and almost unattainable, but the moment you reach it, you can really say you are happy or at least that at some point in time you felt so happy that you cannot describe. That's how the bar rises on its own and that's why those with high-leveled bars shouldn't mess up with them...

Let me not look desperate in your eyes, I had the perfect mutual friendship and I still have it, although it is a bit far away from me...I will always have it after all, so it doesn't really matter where it is situated at the moment, because it will always be there for me....

To all of you my "beloveds" (you know who you are). Just remember that you will always be there...UNREPLACEABLE...STATIC...ETERNAL

There is real mutual sacrificing friendship and I wish you all have it some day...and make sure you know how to keep it of course...because not many people are ready to give it up to you (many of them just hurry up and grab their own happiness (egoism) out of the beginning of your "friendship")

A beer for friendship and a cigarette for all of them who once felt it and would always have it...

ENJOY!

Why is journalism going crap? Or maybe this is just how it's always been?

2007-02-27T20:33:00.000-08:00

Yes, I finally decided to put this blog in the hobbies' section 'cause I really hoped to make a good hobby out of my journalism course...but no...all I appreciate now in article producing is merely and only column writing about which I am actually not going to study anything "because it is not JOURNALISM; it is BULLSH**" (the good thing is that no one can stop me from trying to do it here on the blank sheet).

So, for all of you who still admire the journalistic field - please be aware that you (most of my extreme-team friends) most probably hate real journalism, because you admire individuality and personal style, admire creative people with good sense for news; admire investigative journalism coming out of the most dangerous "hot-news" places where there is really something happening and you feel part of it, or maybe all you admire journalism about are the free-style articles coming out of some of the best alternative magazines in which columnists which I would afford to call journalists just write about their experiences, observations, feelings about certain topics or maybe even politically-angled articles which give all the sides of a story and possible interesting explanations accompaning them....yes, my friends I also admire this type of journalism...I admire creativity in writing, I admire playing with words and catching people's attention with what you are saying and the way you are saying it ... I admire those who are actually able to achieve such things BUT...what is actually the real "hard-core" journalism?

Hard-core journalism OR the most significant and difficult part of journalism is to fit in a certain frame, to be clear and as my journalism teacher (straight coming from the BBC newsline) says:

"Write as simple as possible but not dull, as if you are writing for 12-year intelligent children"

...and thus be objective... ... and what is more - think how on hell you can fill in the rest of your paper with something simply said and still interesting (because the paper cannot come out with 3 pages less - we have to figure out some soft news and just "serve" them to those who would get bored enough just after finishing the first soft article called

"A phenomenon in the animal world" and which is talking about a dog with 45 puppies that came out at once ...woooww that's news)
YEAH, right! but actually NO WAY You can be creative and still keep your objectivity...and at the same time be simple (but not dull) and be more biased than ever...

Newswriting has some good points, some good principles on which it was actually based, namely to be objective and to not give personal opinion on the topic which you are presenting to the people, because everyone is more or less able to figure out for himself what to think and which position to take (and for those who always wait for someone to tell them what to think - just to look for this someone somewhere else...maybe in a book which some friend of theirs recommends them!!!)...

I would like to give my opinion here in this blog (which once again shows that to be a journalist is just not my thing) but I think that I haven't really seen such a journalist (and if I think for a moment about Bulgarian newspaper - oooo I am really sure in what I am saying)

Or maybe Habermas in the end will turn out to be the wisest of all by stating that concept such as objectivity is a social equality utopia which we all would love to believe in but do not really see...

Long live sociology and the constant doubt in all we see around. Journalism and the freedom of speech have to allow people to use their freedom of forming own opinion... We all still believe in this statement...and we have to go on believing...even if we do it from the mere egoistic point of view that we and only we rule over ourselves... ENOUGH!

--> all the space in this blog will not help me put my message across and find the compromise I am so eagerly looking for!