A Gender Perspective on Language, Ethnicity, and Otherness in the Serbian Higher Education System

ABSTRACT

As borders and political systems change, members of some nations become minorities, resulting in multifaceted changes to those communities. This paper draws on Otherness and intersectionality in problematizing the interplay of gender, ethnicity, and language within Serbian academia for ethnic minority female students. I examine the narratives of ethnic-minority Hungarian female students when they explain their experience of Otherness through language in the Serbian higher-education system. Additionally, I examine the narratives of Serb majority-female academics, when they narrate about their experience with the minority students who struggle with Serbian language skills. I highlight how language becomes an element of Otherness for the ethnic minority female students, and how it has a different effect in the social sciences and humanities (SSH) compared with science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. The paper raises important issues relating to research into gender and ethnic spaces of higher education systems in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE).

KEYWORDS:

• Academia
• Central and Eastern Europe (CEE)
• ethnicity
• gender
• intersectionality
• language
• otherness
• Serbia

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Professor Stephen May (The University of Auckland, New Zealand) for recommending the Journal of Language, Identity and Education to me. I would like to thank Professor Tibor Várady (member of the Serbian Academy of Science and Arts) for providing me with his first-hand experiences, information and relevant literature on the situation and environment at the University of Novi Sad in the beginning of the 1990s in Serbia. It is a such a great honor to know him and be able to discuss relevant issues from the past and present in a very friendly and approachable manner.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Vojvodina was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, before the Trianon treaty, up until 1920.

2. Statistical Office of the Republic of Serbia, 2011 Census of Population, Households and Dwellings in the Republic of Serbia, Belgrade: Statistical Office of the Republic of Serbia (2012).

3. Bylaw on the curriculum for the first, second, third and fourth grade of primary education and and Bylaw on the curriculum for the third grade of primary education (Official Gazette of the Republic of Serbia, no. 1/2005, 15/2006, 2/2008, 2/2010, 7/2010, 3/2011—other bylaw 7/2011—other bylaw, 1/2013, 11/2014, 11/2016 and 12/2018).

4. At the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Novi Sad, students can study Hungarian language and literature, not as a foreign language, but as their mother tongue. Other university faculties in which education is conducted exclusively in Hungarian include the Hungarian-language (actor/actress) department of the Academy of Arts and the Teacher Training Faculty in the Hungarian language, based in Subotica, but being officially part of the University of Novi Sad.

5. Zakon o visokom školstvu [Act on University Education], Službeni glasnik SRS 50/1992.

6. Due to the rise of nationalism in Serbia at that time, several ethnic minority university professors left. They left because of new legal circumstances that indirectly forced them to make such a decision. This was the case, for example, at the Faculty of Law, University of Novi Sad, with the internationally recognized professor Tibor Várady, who later became a member of the Serbian Academy of Science and Arts (SANU) (Nikšić, 1993).

7. Law on Higher Education “Official Gazette of the Republic of Serbia,” No. 76/2005, 100/2007—authentic interpretation, 97/2008, 44/2010, 93/2012, 89/2013, 99/2014, 45/2015—authentic interpretation and 68/201.

8. The names of the towns in the text are given in Serbian, but they also have their official names in Hungarian due to the ethnically diverse population living there, namely: Ada, Topolya, Újvidék, Pancsova, Temerin, Szabadka, and Szenttamás.

9. In Table 1, it is only stated whether or not the interviewee was educated in the Serbian language, as this was the exception, whereas the rest of the interview respondents were educated in Hungarian.

10. In the Serbian higher-education system, the grades go from 5 to 10, where 5 is a fail and 10 is the highest grade.

11. He gained a lecturer’s position at a college outside Novi Sad and had to travel more than an hour by car for his work in one direction.

12. The associate who SFP2 discussed here left the University of Novi Sad only recently and emigrated to Austria.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Karolina Lendák-Kabók

Karolina Lendák-Kabók is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Novi Sad, Serbia. She earned her PhD in Gender Studies in 2019. Her research interests include intersectionality, ethnic minorities, language rights and gender differences in academia. She has edited a book of essays with ethnic minority Hungarian women living in Serbia, titled Üvegplafon? Vajdasági magyar (értelmiségi) női perspekívák [Glass Ceiling? Hungarian (Intellectual) Women’s Perspectives in Vojvodina], Novi Sad: Forum, 2020. She is currently working on a monograph on ethnic minorities in Serbian academia and the role of gender and language barriers, forthcoming with Palgrave Macmillan in 2021. Karolina is a mother of three underage children.