Session Information
23 SES 12D, Minority Education
Symposium
Contribution
This presentation explores the case of Bulgarian, predominantly Roma, schools to illustrate the long history of stereotypes about Roma people dating back to modernity’s discursive binary oppositions of “civilized” versus “barbarians.” The data from a longitudinal study with 12 Bulgarian educators showed the modes by which Roma as the Other is created in the school context as a universal cognitive category, internalized in social and individual identities that divide the world into “us” and “them” (Buchowski, 2006, p.464). The presentation argues that Bulgarian teachers’ perceptions of attitudes, behaviour, and values of Roma communities are in fact a projection of the discursive representations with which Western European modernity has constructed the Balkan region (Bakić-Hayden, 1995; Todorova, 2009). The case of Bulgarian, predominantly Roma, schools serves to illustrate how peoples who are Othered in the Western European discourse designate their own Other, and thus provides a fruitful approach to understanding how Roma’s social exclusion is constructed and situated.
The analysis demonstrates that the explicit attention to Roma education reinforces cultural racism (Balibar, 1991) in Bulgaria. It shows that orientalist modes help teachers to act as gatekeepers of a limited social imaginary, as understood by Cornelius Castoriadis, with its signifiers of success (i.e. liberal capitalism, Europe, nation). This brings the need to put the whole discourse of Roma inclusion into question and ask about the characteristics of targeted approaches of inclusion. This research contributes to further explicating how the ideological paradigm of neoliberalism intersects with societal orientalization (Said, 1979) and how it is reconfigured to construct those incapable of fitting within the entrepreneurial spirit of the free market efficiency as unwilling to democratize (Buchowski, 2006).
References
Bakić-Hayden, M. (1995). Nesting Orientalisms: The Case of Former Yugoslavia. Slavic Review, 54(4), 917–931. Balibar, E. (1991). Is There a ‘Neo-racism’?. In Race, nation, class: ambiguous identities, ed. E Balibar & I. M. Wallerstein (pp. 17–29). London; New York: Verso. Buchowski, M. (2006). The Specter of Orientalism in Europe: From Exotic Other to Stigmatized Brother. Anthropological Quarterly, 79(3) 463–482. Castoriadis, C. (1997). The Castoriadis reader. Oxford & Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers. Said, E. (1979). Orientalism. New York: Vintage. Todorova, M. N. (2009). Imagining the Balkans. New York: Oxford University Press.
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