Educating the Ethnic "Other": Exploring Orientalist Discourses in Roma Representation in Bulgarian Schools

• In Event: Hilton Roundtable Session 18
  In Roundtable Session: International Inclusion Education

Abstract

This presentation uses the case of Bulgarian, predominantly Roma, schools to demonstrate the long history of stereotypes about Roma people dating back to modernity’s discursive binary oppositions of “civilized” versus “barbarians.” The analysis of interviews with 12 Bulgarian educators showed the construction of Roma’s “otherness” in the school context as a universal cognitive category, internalized in social and individual identities that divide the world into “us” and “them” (Buchowski, 2006, p.464). The study reveals that Bulgarian teachers’ perceptions of Romani communities are in fact a projection of the discursive representations with which Western European modernity has constructed the Balkan region as Europe’s Other.

Authors

• Veselina Lambrev, University of South Florida

• Bozhin Traykov

• Anna Kirova, University of Alberta