Authors: Daniel Gerbery and Roman Džambazovič – Comenius University – Slovakia

A tolerance of diversity represents one of the fundamental values of the liberal democracies. Accepting diversity means, inter alia, that people do not maintain a social distance from the members of particular groups or social categories. Thus, by measuring social distance from various groups, which may face risk of social marginalization or exclusion, one can reveal the extent of in/tolerance in a given society. At the same time, it is also a good proxy indicator of interpersonal trust that forms a basis of social cohesion.
In Slovakia, several sociological studies report a growing intolerance and distrust against social groups that are perceived as being different by the surrounding society. There are also data on increasing prevalence of prejudice, chauvinism and extremist far-right values, as – for example – index DEREX (Demand for Right-Wing Extremist) reports. Continue reading “Social Distance from the “Others” or Tolerance of Diversity? Attitudes of Young People in Slovakia”

Author: Ayça Oral – Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University – Turkey

A recent fieldwork report¹ on youth in Turkey was published by a non-governmental organisation – Habitat Association (Habitat) in January 2020. This survey was conducted by the Infakto RW, an independent public opinion research company founded in 2003 in Turkey. The study by RW 6-18 Infakto dated April 2019, represented the urban youth population from 16 provinces of Turkey; data was collected through face-to-face interviews with 214 young people aged 18-29. 50 percent of the interviewed youth were women, 50 percent men, 44 percent were employed, 26 percent students, 13 percent were looking for jobs, and 17 percent were teens that neither worked nor went to school.

The report was based on the perspective of the ability (capacity) approach which was put forward by Amartya Sen. The approach provides a wide spectrum for youth’s capacity within the given opportunities and rights. In other words, to what capacity youth turn to themselves within the frame of rights and opportunities. Aside from that, this research report aims to create an archive regarding youth studies that have been analysed and commented upon by the youth and also show the correlation between the youth’s requests and public service.
Continue reading “The Current State of Well-Being of Youth in Turkey”

Authors: Marko Mustapić, Ben Perasović and Ivan Hrstić – Ivo Pilar – Croatia

Space is a key resource for the local community, and the relationships that keep the community’s members together are founded on their satisfaction of social needs. Social processes that unfold in a particular space and the way people live and share space indicate the basic determinants of a given local community, as well as to functional and psychological ties among people. Thus, the ‘feeling of belonging’ to a particular community is of special importance. Every city has its own daily life experiences. Residents frequently alter urban public spaces through interventions such as graffiti and murals that mark space and depict community symbols. Graffiti as an expression of community collectivity became the subject of research in the social sciences in the second half of the 20th century. Public spaces in city centres are most frequently subject to this type of intervention from residents, generally without the prior approval of local authorities. The first sociological research on this subject in Croatia was published in the early 1990s, focusing on the city of Split. Continue reading “Youth, Sport and Social Activism within a Heritage Site”

Author: Cornelia Sylla – Haw Hamburg – Germany

As researchers, working for the CHIEF project, our current task is trying to find answers to questions on cultural heritage and identity. Which influences, which knowledge, which stories come to be the cultural heritage of a certain group? Which factors define someone’s cultural identity? Which roles do nationality, ethnicity, language, religion, politics, history, or other factors that we might not have thought about yet play?

Continue reading “Reflections on “Our” German Cultural Heritage and Identity”

Author: Saim Buğra Kurban – Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University – Turkey

In Turkey, cultural policy is an important field of power, conflict, and transformation, especially in the process of nation-state building. Cultural management and heritage are crucial in every step of politics, from what can be accepted as a national heritage to which projects are supported and preserved by public funds. Although Turkey is a centralized country, one of the questions that can be asked at this point is why there is such a complex, changeable and entangled institutional structure associated with cultural assets and heritage?

Continue reading “Organisational Complexity and Ambiguity in Cultural Management”

Author: Alina Romanovska – Daugavpils University – Latvia

A variety of factors such as specific features of cultural and historical development of a country, its strategic development objectives in the fields of cultural policy, the economy and culture, the ethnic composition of the population, social behaviour, etc. determine cultural education development in a given country. National priorities in the area of cultural education are reflected in policy documents and curricula, the analysis of which gives an idea of the most important objectives and forms of future development. Continue reading “Quo Vadis, Cultural Education in Latvia”

Author: Priya Gohad – Savitribai Phule Pune University – India

The city of Pune is growing by the day in the flow of urbanisation and globalisation. The city which was once known as a ‘Cultural hub’ is now a popular ‘Cyber hub’. The suburbs of the city are rapidly developing, creating various pockets of cultural identities as a result of migration, modernisation and the growing population. Although much has changed for this city, one can catch a glimpse of this old mediaeval town as one walks through its chaotic lanes and feels the essence of its past in the form of ‘heritage’ that still strives to exist and maintain its identity. Located in one such small lane, in the old city of Pune, is the Kelkar Musuem. Continue reading “A Museum Re-establishing its Identity in the Process of Urban Development”

Author:  Demelza Jones – University of Gloucestershire – UK

As part of the CHIEF project’s work to date we have conducted a systematic review of secondary school curricula across social sciences and humanities subjects, as well as interviews with young people in schools and informal educational settings, and with educators and practitioners working in these settings. While the nine countries the CHIEF project is working in represent a wide variety of contexts, some key findings have emerged with broad applicability across the study. One such theme has emerged from our work on history curricula, Continue reading “Developing an Inclusive History Curriculum: An Overview of Current Initiatives in the UK”

Authors: Rati Shubladze  and Tamar Khoshtaria – Caucasus Research Resource Centre – Georgia

On May 12, 2019, the Joseph Stalin museum hosted a public lecture in his hometown, Gori¹, dedicated to the “Day of Georgia’s Allotment to the Virgin Mary”, a holiday that the parliament of Georgia minted into the calendar a week prior in special session.² Rather than a scene from a postmodern farce or satire, this is Georgian reality. In that reality, memory is bifurcated. As Nutsa Batiashvili³ has argued, this bifurcation in collective memory presents Georgia as glorious or heroic and wrong or inadequate at the same time. Memory of the legacy of Joseph Stalin in Georgia is no exception to this broader pattern, and the Stalin Museum in Gori is a clear manifestation of this. Continue reading “How is Memory about Stalin kept in Contemporary Georgia?”

Author: Yıldırım Şentürk – Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University – Turkey

Demet Lüküslü, Begüm Uzun, and Yüksel Taşkın have recently published their research findings on youths and polarisation in Turkey supported by TÜSES (Türkiye Sosyal Ekonomik ve Siyasal Araştırmalar Vakfı) and Friedrich Ebert Stiftung.¹ For a while, politicians and political parties have been inclined to advance political polarisation in Turkey by using polarising strategies. In this sense, pious versus secular is one of the issues forcing individuals to take a stance on it and eventually shaping individuals’ political attitudes as well as lifestyles, in a vicious circle. Continue reading “Recent Research Findings on Youths and Polarisation in Turkey”

Author: Ivan Hrstić – Institute of Social Sciences Ivo Pilar – Croatia

Since the Mid-2000s the process of designing and implementing a curriculum reform in Croatia has been taking place. It has been characterised by a number of controversies as it has resulted in heated discussions in academia. It has also become a major issue on the political scene, in the right and left wing bloc debates. The importance of the curriculum has been emphasised considering the key role formal education plays in the production and transition of cultural knowledge and the development of cultural literacy among young people. The school curriculum embodies dominant narratives in terms of identity formation processes, relationships to cultural heritage and inter-culturalism. Accordingly, some of the most addressed questions in the aforementioned debates in Croatia have been related to history interpretations, particularly regarding the Second World War, socialist era and the Homeland war for independence in the 1990s, which have been understood as the national identity fundaments. Continue reading “The Intertwined Relationship between Politics and Curriculum Reform”

Author: Marta Rovira – Universitat Pompeu Fabra – Spain

Can a cultural tradition be a process of acquisition of cultural literacy for new migrants? It is sometimes difficult to incorporate new migrants into the most traditional part of our local culture. However, any culture is a product of diverse cultural processes through history. And local tradition could be understood as not so local. Neither so traditional. And perhaps it could become an opening invitation for integration and sharing cultural practices with people from other countries. Continue reading “Integration and diversity in Catalan popular culture heritage”