Care-full failure: how auxiliary assistance to poor Roma migrant women in Spain compounds marginalization

ABSTRACT

In Spain, the national and local authorities boast in recent years about their progressive programs for the integration of Roma migrants from Romania. Many state efforts to work with Roma on their integration are specifically directed at women. Economic integration into the waged labor market is considered a major goal as it, supposedly, leads to the empowerment of Roma migrant women while also securing decent standards of living for entire families. This article argues that integration programs adversely result in the further discrimination and exclusion of those they pretend to relief. This adverse result is produced through a two-tier intervention in the lives of Roma families. The caring state works with a general category of ‘vulnerability’ for targeting populations, in which Roma migrant women are specifically incorporated through designated social programs. The performance of Roma as the subject–object of these programs is carefully evaluated. According to these evaluations, Roma women often fail to meet the normative standards of ‘good mothers’, ‘decent wives’, and ‘diligent workers’. Subsequently, to deal with ‘failing subjects’, the disciplining state, a-la Foucault, inflicts an array of penalties on Roma women and their families: cut-offs of social benefits, evictions from poor dwellings, withdrawal of children’s custody, and forced removals to Romania. We thus argue that initiatives by the caring state (and civil society) often prescribe or go hand-in-hand with repression from the correcting state. In welfare states, social programs can thus conclusively ‘evidence’ existing stereotypes about marginalized Roma families and about women in particular.     

On Ring Grooming in optical networks

An instance I of Ring Grooming consists of m sets A ₁,A ₂,…, A _m from the universe {0, 1,…, n − 1} and an integer g ≥ 2. The unrestricted variant of Ring Grooming, referred to as Unrestricted Ring Grooming, seeks a partition {P ₁ , P ₂, …,P _k } of {1, 2, …, m} such that for each 1 ≤ i ≤ k and is minimized. The restricted variant of Ring Grooming, referred to as Restricted Ring Grooming, seeks a partition of {1,2,…,m} such that | P _i | ≤ g for each and is minimized. If g = 2, we provide an optimal polynomial-time algorithm for both variants. If g > 2, we prove that both both variants are NP-hard even with fixed g. When g is a power of two, we propose an approximation algorithm called iterative matching. Its approximation ratio is exactly 1.5 when g = 4, at most 2.5 when g = 8, and at most in general while it is conjectured to be at most . The iterative matching algorithm is also extended for Unrestricted Ring Grooming with arbitrary g, and a loose upper bound on its approximation ratio is . In addition, set-cover based approximation algorithms have been proposed for both Unrestricted Ring Grooming and Restricted Ring Grooming. They have approximation ratios of at most 1 + log g, but running time in polynomial of m ^g . Work supported by a DIMACS postdoctoral fellowship.     

Being other: Intersubjectivity,allocentrism and the possible

This paper engages with the issues of intersubjectivity by raising three main questions about it: What is the status of the other and of the perspective of the other? How would a social ontology that starts from the other look like? and What is the relation between intersubjectivity and the possible? In addressing these questions, I propose four main approaches to self–other relations, each one focused on a different set of theories of intersubjectivity: cognitive (being self), pragmatist (becoming other), dialogical (becoming self), and allocentric (being other). Their main premises, processes, theories and proponents, as well as implications for ethics and the emergence of novelty, are reflected on in turn. Allocentrism emerges as a useful way to shift the focus from self to other in discussions of intersubjectivity, as an ontological condition of the possible, but also as a difficult position to adopt in practice, particularly in polarized societies.     

Comparative Examination of Self-Perceived Health and Other Measures of the Quality of Life Across the EU-27

In various fields of research self-perceived health has been defined and analysed as a significant measure of the health-related quality of life, and also as a predictor of health status. This paper examines the determinants of self-perceived health in the EU-27 area in order to find whether a common set of governmental policies could improve the self-perceived health and whether this positive effect would remain positive and significant on other measures of the quality of life as well as across the quintiles of income distribution. A number of panel regression models using the first-difference GMM estimator are applied to comparatively examine self-perceived health together with other measures of health status and quality of life, based on Eurostat data from 2003 to 2012. The empirical results of the paper could provide useful insights for the European health policy and other common actions and policies in the field of the quality of life.     

Post-abolition Angola in a post-colonial mission archive: a preliminary contextualisation of a photograph from the Spiritans’ mission in Malange,northern Angola, 1904

This essay is about issues of methodology when undertaking research in a post-colonial missionary archive. It is an attempt at recovering the local history of post-abolition Angola from the photographic holdings of the archive of the Spiritan Congregation by restoring the links of a photograph to its context and to contemporary historical discourse. The subject matter is a photograph taken in 1904 at the mission of Malange, in northern Angola. It shows catechists, men and women wearing European and African dress, and children, some of whom were born “free,” while others were “freed slaves.” They were grouped around a Marian shrine on the occasion of the inauguration of the first printed edition of Spiritans’ bilingual catechism in Portuguese and Kimbundu. By commuting between foreground and background, the essay traces the ramifications of the history of a cultural zone of confluence of different worlds. The project underlying the essay is to use historical photographs to recover the past seen from “the other side.”     

Images of Romania and America in early twentieth-century Romanian-Jewish immigrant life stories in the United States

This paper focuses on ethnic life stories written by early twentieth-century Romanian-Jewish immigrants to the US, and attempts to determine to what extent these narratives correspond to the generalised pattern of ethnic life writing at the time, as well as what particularises their texts. I analyse the memoirs of M.E. Ravage, Konrad Bercovici, Maurice Samuel and Edward G. Robinson, all of them born at the close of the nineteenth century but publishing their memoirs at different moments in history. I first trace the images of Romania that spring from these texts, ranging from the legal and educational discrimination portrayed by M.E. Ravage and Edward G. Robinson, to the existence of pogroms and other anti-Jewish feelings foregrounded by Konrad Bercovici, and to the nostalgic shtetl atmosphere evoked in Maurice Samuel's books. I then consider the place of the US in these authors' writings, starting from its utopian image prior to emigration to its more complex image after settlement in the new location. Finally, I show how their return journeys to Romania at different moments in time and the persisting prejudiced atmosphere they found there contributed in all cases to these authors becoming strong supporters of American democracy and its openness to critical debate.     

School Satisfaction Among Adolescents: Testing Different Indicators for its Measurement and its Relationship with Overall Life Satisfaction and Subjective Well-Being in Romania and Spain

This paper presents results from two samples of adolescents aged 13–16 from Romania and Spain (N = 930 + 1,945 = 2,875). The original 7-item version of the Personal Well-Being Index (PWI) was used, together with an item on overall life satisfaction (OLS) and a set of six items related to satisfaction with school. A confirmatory factor analysis of the six school satisfaction items shows good fit statistics when relating them to a latent variable. However, said latent variable does not show a good fit when related to the OLS or the PWI. Tests have led to the conclusion that the item that best summarises satisfaction with school is “satisfaction with my life as a student”. Adding this item to the PWI-7 has shown a good fit with Structural Equation Modeling and higher standardised loading on the OLS. The analysis developed here, while confirming that the inclusion of a domain on satisfaction with school life contributes to the PWI with unique variance (2.5 % in this research), also offers an explanation for the surprising results obtained for adolescents in other countries (e.g. in Australia, Tomyn and Cummins in Soc Indicat Res 101(3):405–418 2010) by showing that satisfaction with friends at school and satisfaction with classmates did not significantly contribute to satisfaction with school. Our results suggest that school satisfaction is highly related to satisfaction with teachers, but weakly related to overall life satisfaction, while satisfaction with school friends and satisfaction with classmates are highly related to overall life satisfaction, but weakly related to satisfaction with school. Satisfaction with life as a student seems to be the item that best reconciles this “paradox” (in adults’ eyes), at least with our samples of Romanian and Spanish adolescents.     

The premium of inflation-indexed life insurances for the Romanian life table

This paper deals with the pricing process of life insurances that provide an insured sum indexed annually according to the current inflation rate. In these terms we propose an appropriate formula for the discount factor. In order to describe the inflation, we consider a stochastic autoregressive model. We deduce analytical expressions for the mean value and the variance of random variable defined as the present value of 1 unit indexed annually according to the inflation rate, payable over t years, when inflation is generated by an autoregressive process of order one. At the same time, we obtain numerical results for the Romanian life table, regarding the mean and the standard deviation for the actuarial present value of a pure endowment life insurance with the sum insured indexed annually with the inflation rate.