CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2016
| Author | Cara, Ramona-Maria |
|---|---|
| Title | PUZZLES OF EMPOWERMENT The significance of capacity building in empowering young Roma |
| Summary | The Roma embody the largest and youngest Europe’s minority with an estimated 10 to 12 million people, out of which nearly half are children and youth. In today’s Europe, they experience multiple realities of exclusion from political and public life. Various Roma policies and the European Roma movement in general label educated Roma youth as ‘role models’, ‘future leaders’, ‘elites’ and engines for social change at the community level. This thesis investigates the significance of a capacity building in empowering young Roma and Roma in general. More closely, this thesis conducts an inquiry into the experiences of a capacity building a program for Roma in a widely known international graduate university. The reason that leads me to carry out this investigation is that while being an RAP student, I often heard that the empowerment of the Roma communities depends on the capacity of the educated Roma youth to mobilize their communities in order to produce social changes and foster social inclusion. Today this thesis contribute to the literature and to challenge the above-mentioned narratives by taking the Roma Access Programs as a case study and by bringing the voice of the Roma students into light vis-a-vis the policy discourses and approaches directly affecting them. I am to demonstrate that empowerment should not have a pivotal role mainly in community capacity building, but rather in human capacities building. This is a micro-level analysis focusing specifically on the discourses of Roma Initiative Office of the Open Society Foundations (RIO) and Roma students at CEU. The qualitative data is generated by three methods: document analysis, semi-structured interviews and focus groups. The interviews and focus groups cross-examined different perceptions of the RIO, CEU and Roma experts related to the roles of the Roma youth within the European Roma movement. |
| Supervisor | Violetta Zentai |
| Department | School of Public Policy MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2016/cara_ramona.pdf |
Visit the CEU Library.
© 2007-2021, Central European University