Roma Local Minority Self-Governance in Hungary, public lecture by Kai Schafft (Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies, CEU and Associate Professor of Education at Penn State University )

Roma Local Minority Self-Governance in Hungary,

the Politics of Inclusion and Exclusion, and an Inquiry into the Institutional Agency of Marginalized Communities

a public lecture by

Kai Schafft    (Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies, CEU and Associate Professor of Education at Penn State University )

Abstract: This seminar will discuss the ongoing impacts, contradictions, and civic outcomes of Hungary’s 1993 Act 77 on the Rights of National and Ethnic Minorities, legislation that created the framework for self-governance among Hungary’s 13 recognized minority groups, with a specific focus on the Roma/Gypsy minority.  Act 77 on the face of it would appear to represent progressive, inclusive legislation helping to foster multi-ethnic open societies.  However, minority self-governance may alternately further and deepen ethnic social and political exclusion, especially where Roma are concerned, because of contradictions within the law, limited political and fiscal resources of minority self-governments, and the law’s framing around the concept of “cultural autonomy” when the most immediate problems affecting Roma are social and economic in nature.  Commentators have thus rightly focused on the (very real) limitations and contradictions of minority self-governance, particularly with regard to the circumstances of the represented communities.  And yet many empirical questions remain regarding both the circumstances under which Roma minority self-governance may alternately result in social inclusion and/or exclusion, as well as the nature of social and political agency of excluded minorities.  This talk takes on these questions by reviewing earlier work, and outlining an agenda of research.

Biography: Kai A. Schafft, a fellow within CEU’s Institute for Advanced Studies, is a rural sociologist and an Associate Professor of Education at Penn State University where he edits the Journal of Research in Rural Education, and directs the Center on Rural Education and Communities.  His work broadly focuses on rural transformation, the relationships between social and spatial inequality, and the connection between the well-being of rural schools and the communities within which they are located.  He has authored and edited three books, as well as over 70 journal articles, reports and reviews.  His most recent work examines the local impacts of unconventional gas development in rural Pennsylvania “boomtown” communities.  His work this year at CEU revisits earlier research on the social and political implications of the Roma minority self-governance in Hungary.