Educating the Hungarian Roma: Nongovernmental Organizations and Minority Rights

(Hardback)

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This book is based on 18 months of ethnographic research with nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that take the primary interventionist role in Roma education throughout Hungary. Through the use of ethnographic interviews, long-term participant observation and textual analysis of NGO websites, pamphlets, and promotional materials, Andria D. Timmer examines the nongovernmental sector as the locale in which the politicized Gypsy identity is constructed, interpreted, and contested. Many NGOs uphold the provider-beneficiary dichotomy, which blames failures on cultural or ethnic differences, rather than address the discrimination, racism, segregationist policies, and outright violence against the Roma. This policy has further exacerbated the residential isolation, discrimination, and manufactured sense of cultural differences that enables the continued practice of segregating Roma children into ethnically homogeneous schools or classrooms that commonly offer less quality education than that which their majority peers receive.

Reviews

Andria Timmers volume is a persuasive and rich-in-detail account of the hindrancesand shortcomings of the modus operandi of educational Roma NGOs and organizations that work with Roma in Hungary. . . . a valuable contribution to the cognition of the civil society sphere in central and eastern Europe. * Slavic Review *
Bold and personal, Timmers rich ethnography of real-world quagmires of inclusion and representation balances scholarly rigor and activist concerns. Timmer paints a realistic, nuanced picture of how NGOs have largely failed in their objective to improve education for Roma or Gypsy communities and lays out the groundwork needed to imagine solutions. -- Mark Schuller, Northern Illinois University
At once a compelling study of a Roma village school and a devastating analysis of the cultural and ethnic essentialisms that can undermine anti-discrimination interventions, Educating the Hungarian Roma will be of great value to social scientists, NGOs, and policymakers. -- Maya Nadkarni, Swarthmore College

Author Bio

Andria D. Timmer is lecturer of anthropology at Christopher Newport University.