BiblioVault - Books about Minority Studies

A Task for Sisyphus

Why Europe’s Roma Policies Fail

Iulius Rostas

Central European University Press, 2019

Despite an increasing number of EU and government initiatives in their favor, the situation of Roma in Europe has only worsened. This book explores the many miscalculations, misconceptions, and blunders that have led to this failure. Looking at Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Romania, Rostas shows how policy makers in each country have mishandled already confused EU policy, from failing to define “Roma” to not having a way to evaluate their own progress. Rostas further argues that the alleged successes of these policies were actually the product of poor information and sometimes outright deception. Examining perennial topics among Roma like school segregation and political representation, the author shows how often the so-called success of Roma policies can be fallacious and simply pave the way for further problems.Rostas maintains that when the EU’s Framework for Roma program comes to an end in 2020, there must be a fundamental shift in policy for there to be any real improvement for Roma. Policy makers will have to address Roma issues not only in terms of poverty and social exclusion but also in terms of the particular nature of Romani ethnic identity. This shift requires reconceiving Roma as a “politically insular minority” and rearranging the power dynamics of local government to ensure that when the new era of Roma policy begins Roma themselves will have a voice in its formulation.

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Teaching "Race" with a Gendered Edge

Brigitte Hipfl

Central European University Press, 2012

How to deal with gender, women, gender roles, feminism and gender equality in teaching practices? Following in the footsteps of the ATHENA thematic network, ATGENDER brings together specialists in women’s and gender studies, feminist research, women’s rights, gender equality and diversity. In the book series ‘Teaching with Gender’ the partners in this network have collected articles on a wide range of teaching practices in the field of gender. The books in this series address challenges and possibilities of teaching about women and gender in a wide range of educational contexts. The authors discuss pedagogical, theoretical and political dimensions of learning and teaching about women and gender. The books contain teaching material, reflections on feminist pedagogies, and practical discussions about the development of gender-sensitive curricula in specific fields. All books address the crucial aspects of education in Europe today: increasing international mobility, the growing importance of interdisciplinarity, and the many practices of life-long learning and training that take place outside the traditional programmes of higher education. These books will be indispensable tools for educators who take seriously the challenge of teaching with gender. Teaching “Race” with a Gendered Edge responds to the need to approach the idea of race from a feminist perspective. This collection of essays aims to broaden our understanding of both race and gender by highlighting the intersections and intertwinedness of race, gender, and other axes of inequality. The book also points to the importance of taking colonial legacies into account when it comes to the understanding of contemporary forms of racisms. In an increasingly globalised and interconnected world this perspective is essential for understanding the dynamics of identity politics but also for pointing towards possible ways of intervention and change.The essays in the book discuss historically contextualised examples of the intersections of race and gender from different localities in Europe and beyond and provide readers with a rich body of resources and teaching material.

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Theorizing Discrimination in an Era of Contested Prejudice

Discrimination in the United States

Samuel Roundfield Lucas

Temple University Press, 2009

Despite several decades of attention, there is still no consensus on the effects of racial or sexual discrimination in the United States. In this landmark work, the well-known sociologist Samuel Lucas shows how discrimination is not simply an action that one person performs in relation to another individual, but something far more insidious: a pervasive dynamic that permeates the environment in which we live and work.

Challenging existing literature on the subject, Lucas makes a clear distinction between prejudice and discrimination. He maintains that when an era of “condoned exploitation” ended, the era of “contested prejudice,” as he terms it, began. He argues that the great strides made in the 1950s and 1960s repudiated prejudice, but not discrimination. Drawing on critical race theory, feminist theory, and a critique of dominant perspectives in the social sciences and law, Lucas offers a new understanding of racial and sexual discrimination that can guide our actions and laws into a more just future.

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Turning the Legislative Thumbscrew

Minority Rights and Procedural Change in Legislative Politics

Douglas Dion

University of Michigan Press, 2001

The use of filibusters in the U.S. Senate by small numbers of members to prevent legislative action apparently desired by a majority of the members--as evidenced by the battles over civil rights legislation in the 1950s and 1960s--is legendary. Similar situations have existed in other legislative bodies over time. The fear that they will at some time be in the minority has inhibited actions by the majority groups to control the right of minority groups to block legislative action. And yet from time to time the majority in a legislative body has forced a change in the rules to control the rights of the minority. When does the majority seek to limit minority rights to obstruct legislation? Douglas Dion, in a unique study, develops a formal model to set out the conditions under which majorities will limit minority rights. He finds that when majorities are small, they will be more cohesive. This majority cohesion leads to minority obstruction, which in turn leads to majority efforts to force procedural change to control the ability of the minority to obstruct legislation. Dion then tests his findings in a rich consideration of historical cases from the nineteenth-century U.S. House of Representatives, the nineteenth- and twentieth-century U.S. Senate, the British House of Commons, and an account of the Austro-Hungarian Parliament written by Mark Twain.

Turning the Legislative Thumbscrew is a work that combines formal analysis with extensive historical evidence to address an important problem in democratic theory. Specialists in legislative politics and American political development, as well as those more broadly interested in the relationship between democratic theory and institutional structure, will find the work of great interest.

Douglas Dion is Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of Michigan.

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