Bridges and Walls: Slovenian Multiethnic Literature and Culture is a first step towards a comparative confrontation between the social-cultural situation of Slovenian emigrants and the current social-cultural situation of various groups of immigrants in Slovenia. One of the main goals of this comparative study is to alert the Slovenian majority to the specific socio-cultural conditions of immigrants and thus help to develop both intercultural awareness and a multicultural national identity, which are, in fact, a precondition for a stable society. There are already some early responses to this work from the international community, among others a favourable review in the Columbian scholarly journal Ikala. Published by a renowned international academic publisher, the book upgrades the author’s earlier academic monograph Večkulturna Slovenija (Multicultural Slovenia, 2008 [COBISS.SI-ID 240121344], which was also very favourably reviewed in Slovenian and some foreign academic journals in the field of ethnic and migration studies, Slovene studies and literature (Slovene Studies, U.S.; Migracijske i etničke teme, Zagreb, Croatia; Primerjalna književnost, Slavistična revija, Treatises and Documents: Journal of Ethnic Studies / Razprave in gradivo: Revija za narodnostna vprašanja, Glasnik SED, Dve domovini / Two Homelands…). In 2009–2010 it was included in reading lists for several subjects within undergraduate and postgraduate study programs at the University of Nova Gorica and within the international postgraduate study program Migration and Intercultural Relations.
COBISS.SI-ID: 33825069
The authors discuss the dynamics of immigrant/ethnic entrepreneurship in different welfare state regimes through the prism of theoretical frameworks that were developed in the United States and Europe. It is argued that, contrary to the United States, in Europe this is largely a politically encouraged economic activity with the underlying aim of integration of immigrants into the majority society and maintaining public support for financial redistribution within a weifare state regime. These differences stem from conditions created by different types ofwelfare states and have a strong influence on the development ofethnic entrepreneurship theories on the two continents. Due to exploring ethnic entrepreneurship under different conditions: (neo)liberalism in the United States and (neo)corporativism in Europe, theories follow different ines of analytical reasoning.
COBISS.SI-ID: 33347117
Through exploring politically motivated settlement into the strategically important areas of multi-ethnic countries, this article deals with the presence of Slovenes in the former Austro-Hungarian territory of ex-Yugoslavia. Apart from a comparative analysis of census methodologies, which had recorded data on linguistic or ethnic affi liation in the period after the invention of modern population censuses in the mid-19th century, the author systematically examines the question of the quantitative and statistical presence of Slovenes in the successor states and territories of former Yugoslavia. The main group of arguments is concentrated around the idea of the so-called instrumentalization of ethnicity as a primary factor of planned migration by the state-centres of multi-ethnic countries (e.g. Austria-Hungary, former Yugoslavia). At the same time the paper argues that the motivation of either linguistic or ethnic affi liation to Slovene ethnicity evolved and developed independently of the actual migration flows.
COBISS.SI-ID: 12200013