This article sheds light on recent discursive shifts in representations of the “Balkan” in the Slovenian press. I focus on the strategies that the media, and the left-wing press in particular, uses to construct the identities of immigrant workers in Slovenia. I use critical discourse analysis to show how the media has recently attempted to avoid Balkanism and tried to create a more inclusive, democratic rhetoric on these workers and how they become a legitimate “other” in Slovenian society only when constructed as helpless victims. I analyze the role of the victim in the Slovenian imaginary, its disillusioned hero a cogent signifier for collective national identification, and how this figure’s characteristics are transposed to ex-Yugoslav immigrants to Slovenia, placing them within a rhetoric of victimization that is framed within a broader humanitarian discourse in order to interrogate what Maria Todorova has defined as Balkanism. I conclude by exploring victimization as the process of desubjectivation and point out aspects of victimization that reaffirm long-standing power relations between Europe and the Balkans.
COBISS.SI-ID: 33388381
This article explores parental involvement in the educational trajectories of children in Europe. The analysis is embedded in the framework of the three dominant contemporary social processes that have been acknowledged as crucial factors for the educational and life trajectories of young people today, i.e. familialization, institutionalization, and individualization. The article draws on qualitative data gathered during interviews with parents of lower secondary school students in disadvantaged city areas within the research project, GOETE, in eight European countries. The analysis focuses on specific behavioral aspects that were identified as the most relevant in our empirical evidence: parental educational aspirations and future plans for their children, the role of parents in decision- making in educational transitions and trajectories, parental participation in the school, and parental support with schoolwork. The most striking finding is the persistent emphasis on individual responsibility for both students and parents in terms of education. Parents realize that the future of their child not only depends on the work of the teacher but also to a great and growing degree on parents as coeducators. This parental awareness results in a high level of confidence in the power of education, which is met by parental skepticism when they experience a lack of school support and distant parent-teacher relationships and communication.
COBISS.SI-ID: 33184861
How do the educational trajectories of young people develop differently at the transition between lower and upper secondary education and training - even amongst students labelled as disadvantaged with regard to social background, gender or ethnicity? The aim of the article is to understand the role of decisionmaking in the emergence of educational trajectories. Based on the analysis of qualitative interviews with students from schools in disadvantaged areas, patterns of educational trajectories are discerned with regard to the ruptures they involve, the destinations they take and the degree of choice young people have. The in-depth analysis of exemplary cases, however, reveals that even within similar patterns of trajectories decision-making processes occur in different ways. Therefore, constellations of decision-making are elaborated which cross-cut the patterns of educational trajectories. The fact that both institutional structures of different education systems and individual biographical orientations do make a difference reveals the complexity of educational trajectories in the interplay of structure and agency.
COBISS.SI-ID: 33185117
This article explores how the identity of immigrant workers (mostly ex-Yugoslavians) in Slovenia is constructed in the Slovenian print media. The article focuses on the interplay of the two main discourses on immigrant workers – Balkanist discourse and victimization discourse. The analysis shows how Balkanist discourse still constructs the immigrant as the other but avoids explicitly negative connotations by framing immigrant workers’ identity within a discourse of victimization. The article explains how this interplay of discourses serves to normalize the immigrant worker in order to make him acceptable to the majoritarian Slovenian society. The article closes by exploring the victimization discourse as a process of desubjectivizing of the immigrant workers and argues that aspects of the victimization discourse reaffirm the long-standing power relations between Western Europe and the Balkans. KEY WORDS: immigration, Balkanism, victimization
COBISS.SI-ID: 38035245
The article presents the results of the first national study on the intimate lifestyles of university students in Slovenia, focusing on the analysis of the social conditions in wich the first heterosexual intercourse (FHI) is placed in. After taking account of relevant theories on social changes in the sphere of intimacy and sexsuality in late modernity (Giddens, Bauman), the authors argue that it is largely the social forms of sexsuality and not the content that have changed significantly. The article concentrates on two research questions: first, whether the experience of the FHI is closer to Gidden's concept of a pure relationship or to Bauman's pure sexsual encounter and whether the type of social relationship in wich the FHI was embedded is linked to its content (especially the motives and feelings accompaying it); and second, whether the social relationship in which students experienced their FHI is indeed free from social constraints (e.g. gender, social status and religiosity). Data confirm strong link between the type of relationship in which FHI happened and the modalities of this sexual experience. FHIs embedded in committed relationships (CRs) differ from those occurring in uncommitted relationship (URs) although the differences had various strengths.
COBISS.SI-ID: 33474909