Our paper analyzes the social and religious changes of a Pentecostal Roma community living in an ethnically mixed village from the eastern part of Romania (Moldavia), as well as connections between migratory processes and conversion to Pentecostalism. In the first part of this paper the author presents the Roma community also showing the changes in the Roma’s subsistence strategies after the major turning points of the recent past. The second part of the paper focuses on the presentation of the two types of migration characteristic to the Roma community: 1. migration of beggars’ networks, which is mainly concentrated in Northern European countries; 2. migration to Western European countries with the intention of long term settlement/long term stay. Finally, the study points to the importance of incomes resulting from begging abroad and from other migration-related sources in changing the situation of the Roma community from this village, as well as to the role of conversion to Pentecostalism in the social and economic processes that take place within the Roma community.

Keywords: Roma minority, Moldova, Pentecostals, migration

Full text (in Hungarian)

The Roma children’s low level of participation in education and the high dropout rate among them is seen often as the most problematic issue related to the social integration of Roma. The approaches however usually present the problem from the point of view of the majority, the responsibility for the failures being placed on the particularities of the Roma population. Due to the commitments to EU directives, the Educational Act includes regulations aimed at reducing the disadvantages of Roma children, but the results are hard to see.

The objective of this paper is to identify the barriers of learning and participation of the Roma children, embedded in the educational system, or resulted from the interaction of children with the educational context. The data were collected in the frame of two projects funded by Norwegian Grants, focused on the social and educational integration of Roma. This study is based on semistructured interviews, realized in order to understand the school-related experiences of the Roma people from Pata Rat, and to examine the ability of the educational system to meet the special needs of this population.

The results show that the characteristics of the educational system, like the focus on the achievement, the ranking of the schools based on the results on national evaluations favor the elitism and not the creation of inclusive school politics. Beside the effects of this kind of educational politics, the Roma children are confronted on daily basis with the prejudices and stereotypes embedded in the society related to their ethnicity. In this context, the chances of educational integration of Roma children remain low.

Keywords: inclusive schools, Roma children, barriers of learning and participation, learning motivation

Full text (in Hungarian)

The present study has been carried out within the framework of the project “United Networks. Integrated initiative for the social inclusion of marginalized communities” led by the Caritas – Social Work Organization Alba-Iulia in partnership with the Babeș-Bolyai University Cluj-Napoca, the Mures, Harghita, and Covasna County Directorates for Social Assistance and Child Protection, and Caritas Norway between May 2015 and December 2016.

Our primary purpose is methodological: to construct two complementary macro-level indexes (an index of housing deprivation and an index of low income and unemployment), and compare them with similar, earlier indexes such as the index of community development (Sandu, 2000) and the index of local-level deprivation elaborated by Teșliuc, Grigoraș és Stănculescu (2016). We confront the statistical portraits drawn by these indexes with the results of qualitative fieldwork consisting of interviews with mayors, school principles, social workers, school mediators, etc., and ethnographic observations in twenty rural communities from the central part of historical Transylvania.

We investigate to what extent these composite indicators based on official statistical data regularly reported by local or county-level authorities could reveal the existence of deprived and marginalized settlements, as shown by our qualitative research in these localities. Conversely, we explore whether the results of the qualitative research converge with the statistical data. We pay special attention to the parts of villages inhabited mostly by Roma families, and their situation of social and spatial marginalization and severe deprivation.

Keywords: local level deprivation index, Roma deprivation, Transylvania, Szeklerland

Full text (in Hungarian)