Paper Titles & Abstracts

One of the critical challenges in promoting inclusion of Slovakia's Roma, is the simultaneous pursuit of socio-economic empowerment and policies of recognition. So far, the dominant policy approach seeking integration into mainstream institutions has been delivering ambiguous results. Integrationist approach, consisting predominantly of antipoverty measures, have not been targeting structures into which Roma are supposed to integrate. The minority members are thus left with two alternatives: segregation or, the less likely to be achieved alternative of assimilation. The proposed paper draws on my earlier work that examined the model of National Cultural Autonomy ("NCA") (Renner, K. 1899/2005) combined with aspects of joint governance called transformative accommodation ("TA") (Shachar, A. 2001) as a normative and institutional point of departure of accommodation of the Slovakia's Roma. The proposed paper discusses the potential and limits of NCA and TA in area of Romani education that is critical for both cultural reproduction as well as their socio-economic empowerment. It is also an area of deeply institutionalized practices of segregation taking place either through special schooling or creating parallel Roma only schools/classes within mainstream education. I will explore to what extent the said models can address the binary choice segregation or assimilation.