Papers by Simona Szakács-Behling
1989 as Gateway to the World? The Universalisation of Diversity and the Construction of the ‘New’ Citizen in Romanian Civic Education
In book: "1989" und Bildungsmedien / "1989" and Educational Media, Publisher: Klinkhardt, Editors... more In book: "1989" und Bildungsmedien / "1989" and Educational Media, Publisher: Klinkhardt, Editors: Eva Matthes, Sylvia Schütze, pp.59-71
Europeanization qua Institutionalization of World Culture: Examples from Post-1989 Romanian Education
Inspired by World Society scholarship, I use examples from the Romanian educational sphere to exa... more Inspired by World Society scholarship, I use examples from the Romanian educational sphere to examine Europeanization in relation with worldwide developments. Instead of seeing Europeanization broadly as the process of becoming more ‘European’ (an approach that encounters the difficulty of defining ‘Europe’), or narrowly as a process of ‘EU-ization’ (an approach that suffers from EU-centric blindness to the rest of the world), I propose to define Europeanization as a process of institutionalization of world culture that is particularly visible in post-socialist contexts characterized by an emergence from relative totalitarian isolation. The main finding presented here is an increasing cosmopolitanization of the nation emerging from the way in which the category ‘Europe’ permeates schooled content: the nation is tamed down through discursive association with Europe (a significant other) rather than through elimination or discreditation. By expressing educational scripts that legitimize it as a nation-state in the post-1945 redefined sense of the term, Romania's compulsory education displays signs of becoming more like the rest of the world rather than more like ‘Europe’. Europeanization, in this sense, exemplifies less the goal of catching up with Europe or of joining the EU and more the means to insert Romania into world society.
Changing Patterns of Nation-Building: Educational Reform Narratives in Post-Socialist Romania
Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism, Apr 2014
Through an investigation of policy documents and reports from post-1989 Romanian education reform... more Through an investigation of policy documents and reports from post-1989 Romanian education reform, this article argues that what came to be known in the early 1990s as a ‘post-socialist condition’, characterized by exuberant nationalism, needs to be rethought. Rather than an exceptional path, Romanian education displays conspicuous synchronization with wider world trends, while some peculiar national narratives in explaining reform failures persist. Instead of becoming more nation-focused (as predicted by prevalent conceptualizations of ‘Eastern’ types of nationalism), discourses of educational reform opened up to the world, most notably through the mediation of Europe. Since the end of the nationalizing decade of the 1990s, educational texts have consistently invoked global themes of adaptation. Narratives about the mission of mass education and reform priorities encapsulating officially-sanctioned projections of the nation became outward-looking, in contrast to the self-referential rhetoric of socialist times. The changing patterns of Romanian nation-building are reflective of trends across the world, pointing to a reconsideration of the exceptionalism often associated with Eastern Europe.
Journal of Social Science Education, 2013
Based on thematic content analysis of textbooks, curricula, and an overview of educational legisl... more Based on thematic content analysis of textbooks, curricula, and an overview of educational legislation after the 1989 change of political regime in Romania, this paper presents empirical evidence to argue that that post-socialist citizenship education displays surprising similarities with converging post-war changes in the concept of the ‘good citizen’. The findings suggest a complex picture of change combining liberal, communitarian and cosmopolitan renditions of the new citizen, all having a common thread: the shift towards a post-national ethos de-linking the citizen from the exclusive purchase of national belonging and decoupling citizen action from the absolute duty to the patria. Such significant changes are often overlooked due to the dominant focus on the failures to comply with an idealized Western liberal model. However, they invite us to reconsider current understandings of both the pitfalls and the opportunities of post-socialist citizenship education by considering them from a different angle: that of wider socio-cultural change that is gradually being institutionalised at the world level.
Book review of William Outhwaite's "European Society"
European Societies, 2010
A prominent social theorist focusing on Europe, William Outhwaite has recently moved his attentio... more A prominent social theorist focusing on Europe, William Outhwaite has recently moved his attention towards East European societies and the impact of EU enlargement on shifting conceptions of Europe. In his book he provides a broad overview of these changes by drawing a historic trajectory of 'the thing we call Europe'in cultural, social, geographic, economic and political terms. He traces Europe's route from a relatively small/insignificant entity just before the sixteenth century, to an imperial power and then to its current ' ...
Reconceptualizing the Republic: Diversity and Education in France, 1945-2008
Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Jan 1, 2010
Projections of Diversity in Citizenship Education
In C. Hintermann & C. Johansson (Eds.), Migration and Memory Representations of Migration in Europe since 1960 (pp. 77-91). New Jersey: Transaction Publishers., 2010
After the collapse of the communist regime, Romanian education policy has taken a turn towards Eu... more After the collapse of the communist regime, Romanian education policy has taken a turn towards Europeanization. Drawing from fieldwork data collected in the multicultural district of Cluj, I focus on diversity as an aspect of Europeanization of schooling in Romania. My findings reveal that Europeanization works symbolically rather than substantially in educational establishments enrolling a multi-ethnic student body. Although diversity is embraced discursively by teachers and staff, school practices fail to demonstrate an incorporation of diversity into the Romanian national narrative which remains marked by the old structures of ethnocentric monoculturalism and self-victimization. Explanatory factors brought into discussion refer to institutional continuity (i.e. the persistence of old habits in everyday school practices) and institutional contradiction (i.e. the coexistence of the distinctive logics of multiculturalism as difference and of integration as social justice in the delivery of educational policy for Hungarian and Roma minorities)
The aim of this research is to locate Romania in the larger landscape of the Europeanization proc... more The aim of this research is to locate Romania in the larger landscape of the Europeanization process by assessing educational reform in general with a particular focus on history textbook writing since the communist period. It focuses on the extent to which the educational systems have synchronized with the European direction towards multiculturalism and de-nationalizing trends, and on the Romanian history curriculum and textbook changes after the fall of communism, which have still not reached the formally acknowledged and desired standards. In order to sustain this argument, I empirically delineate the differences between the social construction of identity in national history textbooks in the communist and the post-communist periods by analyzing the content of two high-school history textbooks from a diachronic comparative perspective. The main empirical focus of the content analysis is the implicit and explicit construction of nationhood, which is identified by scrutinizing events, actors and causal attributions within the national narrative presentation. The findings reveal important changes in the formal regulations and application of educational reform in history textbooks, but nevertheless point to implementation difficulties pertaining to deeper national- value and attitudinal features that continue to permeate text production. By finding that history textbooks still fail to accommodate the ‘European’ trend at the level of the national historical narrative, policy makers in education could acknowledge and implement a more thorough harmonization between educational, curricular and textbook reform in contemporary, new EU-member, Romania.
Stereotipurile de gen în reclamele tv (Gender Stereotypes in TV advertisements)
In S. Chelcea (Ed.), Comunicarea nonverbală în spaţiul public (Non-Verbal communication in the public space) (pp. 129-146). Bucharest: Tritonic Publishing House., 2004
Book Reviews by Simona Szakács-Behling
Book review of William Outhwaiteʼs "European Society"
Book review of Werner Schiffauer et al. (eds.) "Civil enculturation: Nation-state, school and ethnic difference in the Netherlands, Britain, Germany and France"
Talks by Simona Szakács-Behling
“Converging with World Trends: The Emergence of the Cosmopolitan Citizen in Post-Socialist Romanian Civic Education”
„Europeanization and Diversity in Multi-Ethnic Romanian Schools”
“Probing Europeanization in the Romanian school: Identity-Making processes at classroom level”
"Europeanization and the construction of the ‘new’ Romanian citizen in a Transylvanian school"
“Schooling the ‘other’: creating European citizens in a multi-ethnic Transylvanian town”
Other by Simona Szakács-Behling
Journal Articles by Simona Szakács-Behling
Nurturing Romanian Socialists: Reading Primers Before, During and After the Second World War
Journal of Educational Media, Memory, and Society, 2019
Drawing on a sample of children’s reading primers published between 1938 and 1953 in Romania, thi... more Drawing on a sample of children’s reading primers published between 1938 and 1953 in Romania, this article explores ways in which both the monarchic and the communist regimes used primary education to fashion political subjects before, during, and after the Second World War. Theoretically grounded in a sociological approach and empirically grounded in textual and visual thematic content analysis, the findings reveal significant semantic shifts in understandings of the “nation” in relation to internal and external anchors, including religion, monarchy, and work, but they also indicate important continuities relating to an ethos of political submission (toward God and king, or the party and the Soviet Union) and patriotic solidarity (with the Romanian Orthodox nation or the workers’ proletarian nation).
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Papers by Simona Szakács-Behling
Book Reviews by Simona Szakács-Behling
Talks by Simona Szakács-Behling
Other by Simona Szakács-Behling
Journal Articles by Simona Szakács-Behling