Search

Migrants living in Europe constitute over half of the world's international migrants and are at higher risk of poor mental health than non-migrants, yet also face more barriers in accessing and engaging with services. Furthermore, the quality of care received is shaped by the experiences and attitudes of health professionals. The aim of this review was to identify professionals' attitudes towards migrants receiving mental healthcare and their perceptions of barriers and facilitators to service provision. Four electronic databases were searched, and 23 studies met the inclusion criteria. Using thematic synthesis, we identified three themes: 1) the management of multifaceted and complex challenges associated with the migrant status; 2) professionals' emotional responses to working with migrants; and 3) delivering care in the context of cultural difference. Professionals employed multiple strategies to overcome challenges in providing care yet attitudes towards this patient group were polarized. Professionals described mental health issues as being inseparable from material and social disadvantage, highlighting a need for effective collaboration between health services and voluntary organizations, and partnerships with migrant communities. Specialist supervision, reflective practice, increased training for professionals, and the adoption of a person-centered approach are also needed to overcome the current challenges in meeting migrants' needs. The challenges experienced by health professionals in attempting to meet migrant needs reflect frustrations in being part of a system with insufficient resources and without universal access to care that effectively stigmatizes the migrant status. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is concerned with examining the meaning of different forms of work found within the EU. Despite the increasing acknowledgement of the importance of the diversity of work forms within Europe, both within the Commission and the European academic literature, it is argued that existing formulations are highly problematic. Existing research, both academic and policy-related, is shown to be characterized by a bewildering terminology, which is often used interchangeably, and which works to reinscribe existing lines of power within the EU. Moreover, this work is shown to be theoretically problematic. The centrality of distinct measurable categories to representations of the diversity of contemporary work within the EU is argued to be a way of thinking which constructs difference in terms of statistical differences, which encourages homogenizing and oppositional representations of North and South, and which also facilitates thinking as the same that which may be very different. Correspondingly, we argue for an alternative analysis of the diversity of work forms, one which is grounded in the different meanings these forms assume in different cultural contexts. Taking three categories of 'atypical' work (part-time, self-employed and undeclared) in three EU member states (Greece, Denmark and the UK), the paper proceeds by demonstrating how categories which are constructed as same/different statistically are rather more complicated when considered in terms of the meanings invested in them. The categories of work are argued to be contextually and culturally embedded; they are inscribed with and reconstituted through culturally specific sets of meanings in each of the three member states under consideration. We conclude the paper by reflecting on the possibilities opened up by this kind of analysis, its implications regarding debates over European labour markets, and its positioning with respect to debates over the relationship between the cultural and the economic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

European integration is far from being only a political and economic problem but has also led to social and cultural challenges, such as the definition of national identity vs European identity and the relationship between member states. There is also a growing sense that, for the nonexpert citizen, the increasing complexity of the EU's institutions and policies means a de facto denial of access to information and policy-making. This paper investigates how the British daily press has been reflecting and responding to these challenges. National stereotyping, for example, is shown to play a key role in the portrayal of France and Germany. Also, data from the Sun are used to illustrate strategies employed to make elite discourse more accessible to the lay reader. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses whether hosting the most prestigious European cultural event, the European Capital of Culture, has an impact on regional economic development and the life satisfaction of the local population. We show that European Capitals are hosted in regions with above-average GDP per capita, but do not causally affect the economic development in a significant way. Surprisingly, using difference-in-difference estimations, a negative effect on the wellbeing of the regional population is found during the event. Since no effect is found before the event, reverse causality and positive anticipation can be ruled out. The negative effect during the event might result from dissatisfaction with the high levels of public expenditure, transport disruptions, general overcrowding or an increase in housing prices. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the ‘intercultural dialogue’ paradigm to ask whether, as conveyed through EU discourses, its conceptualization is flexible enough to encompass the challenges of an increasingly multicultural EU environment. It is argued that, in the past two decades, the notion of a ‘European culture’ has become instrumental to envisioning the EU and has been pushed forward by two main occurrences: the 1989 collapse of cold-war Europe and the subsequent incorporation into the body of Europe of the new central and eastern Europeans, and the processes of globalization, which have rendered Europe’s presence on the global map increasingly vulnerable. Therefore, critical encounters with the employment of ‘culture’ and its support concepts of identity and difference are crucial to the framing of ‘intercultural dialogue’ beyond the cold-war cultural and mental geography, as well as to managing the predicaments which its use may generate in global contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The influence of social and educational factors has often been used to explain social differences in consumption and cultural practices. Without denying the value of such an approach, this article examines the impact of religious denomination and its influence in shaping cultural practices. Our article argues the need for a macro-social, longue durée [long-term] perspective to shed light on cultural differences and why these linger notwithstanding the market and political convergence found in Europe today. The diverse cultural consumption patterns found in European Union (EU) Member States as evidenced by Eurobarometer surveys are examined through our logistic regression analysis. The findings show the explanatory power of the religion variables used by classical historical sociology. These variables have been largely overlooked by modern studies—a shortcoming this article seeks to redress. We see a link between a country's historical religion (the religious "factor") and its cultural consumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship between culture and religion in Western Europe is marked by opposite, if not contradictory trends. One is the rise of ‘pure’ religion, abstracted from ethnicity and culture, which is registered particularly among immigrant minorities. This article focuses on an opposite trend of ‘culturalizing’ religion, which has occurred on the part of majority society. A prominent actor driving this trend is the high courts, which try to square the circle of living up to liberal state neutrality and acknowledging a privileged position for majority religion in society. However, the privileging of Christianity in Europe is light and largely symbolic, as I show in a contrast with the substantive privileging of Islam in Muslim-majority societies. If applied to immigrant Islam, culturalization still has exclusive implications, as it removes the respective practices from the ambit of religious liberty protections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aims: This work examined the role of cultural values in understanding people’s satisfaction with health services across Europe. Methods: We used multilevel linear regression analysis on the seventh round of the European Social Survey from 2014, including c. 40,000 respondents from 21 countries. Preliminary intraclass correlation analyses led us to believe that some explanations of variance in the dependent variable were to be found at the country level. In search of country level explanations, we attempted to account for the role of national culture in influencing citizens’ attitudes towards health systems. This was done by using Hofstede’s dimensions of power distance, individualism, masculinity and uncertainty avoidance, giving each country in the survey a mean aggregated score. Results: In our first model with individual level variables, being female, having low or medium education, experiencing financial strain, and reporting poor health and unmet medical needs were negatively associated with individual satisfaction with national healthcare systems, with the latter variable showing the strongest effect. After including Hofstede’s cultural dimensions in our multilevel model, we found that the power distance index variable had a negative effect on the dependent variable, significant at the 0.1 level. Conclusions: Citizens are likely to evaluate their national health system more negatively in national cultures associated with autocracy and hierarchy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The number of immigrant students in Western Europe is growing steadily, but their social integration and educational achievements are still lagging behind. Nevertheless, there is still very little empirical evidence on which policies can effectively promote them. Thus, this article tests 2 main types of policies: targeted support and intercultural policies, and compares their effect on university graduation of 6 immigrant groups in 13 Western European countries. This research incorporates country- and origin-based variables as well as social and individual characteristics in cross-classified multilevel analyses. Data from the European Social Survey, the Migrant Integration Policy Index, the United Nations (UN) database and the World Bank database are integrated here. Findings show that intercultural policies have more positive effect on immigrant students than targeted policies. Furthermore, there is division between these six groups not only in their actual educational achievements, but also in the extent to which they are helped by education policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article employs music to describe the dynamics of Central European identity at the turn of the 20th century. Conceptually, the analysis is based on the notion of cultural resonance and the distinction between political territories, which isolate identity, and cultural landscapes which let it escape. This theoretical understanding is derived from the acoustic philosophy and musical practice of two Central European composers, Leoš Janáček and Béla Bartók. Exemplified here is artistic ‘extra-territorial’ identity, which is indeed how Theodor Adorno at one point referred to the ‘peripheral’ sound coming from the region. This process of identity construction amplifies paradoxical middle spaces, which Jean Luc Nancy describes evocatively as a cultural mêlée. The vitality of cultural resonance is fuelled by this primary contact with mundane reality and the ‘navigational hesitation’ underpinning identity and its many trajectories. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

During the last decade, European countries have declared a ‘crisis’ of multiculturalism. This crisis has gained significant political traction, despite the empirical absence of a failed experiment with multiculturalism. This introduction focuses on the narrative of multicultural backlash, which purports that ‘parallel societies’ and ‘intolerable subjects’ and practices have been allowed to flourish within European societies. Beyond particular contexts, the problem of intolerable subjects is seen as a shared European challenge, requiring disintegrated migrants and Muslim populations to display loyalty, adopt ‘our’ values, and prove the legitimacy of their belonging. This introduction critiques multicultural backlash, less as a rejection of piecemeal multicultural policies than as a denial of lived multiculture. This is developed through an examination of racism in a post-racial era, and by analysing the ways in which integrationist projects further embed culturalist ontology. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

On the brink of multiculturalism’s demise in Europe, ‘culture’ configures prominently in the immigration politics of Europe and its nation-states. New discourses of integration emphasize dominant values and norms and define civic membership through cultural commitment or loyalty. How is Europe doing integration, and what is integration doing to Europe? Taking its cues from the Dutch Integration Exam, this article analyses how ‘culture’ is paradigmatically disciplined upon new aspiring citizens. It argues that the citizenship test functions as a technique of governmentality that normalizes secular liberalism in its appropriation of the migrant Other. By employing cultural tropes of sexual freedom, gender equality, freedom of speech and individuality as emblems of Dutchness, integration is identified as the successful adaptation to hegemonic liberal and secular virtues, leaving little room for cultural or religious variations. By reflecting on the popularity of the Dutch model, the article assesses the paradoxes and tensions involved in thinking the citizen-subject within Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The introduction to this issue is meant to address the ways in which turbulent immigration is challenging European democratic countries’ capacity to integrate the pluralism of cultures in light of the current state of economic instability, strong public debt, unemployment and an aging resident population. The Reset-Dialogues on Civilizations Association has organized its annual İstanbul Seminars in order to fill the need for constructive dialogue dedicated to increasing understanding and implementing social and political change.Turkey’s accession to the European Union represents in this light a challenge to our liberal views, which must become more open-minded in order to address adequately cultural and religious differences, Islam included. We must set ourselves the task of finding a new perspective so that we may defuse the populist radicalization, fear-mongering politicians and xenophobia that are emerging in many countries. Yet it is equally essential that we reconfigure and recontextualize the traditional secular battle for freedom from the dominance of the Christian majority away from a binary opposition to a plural dimension that takes into account other religious communities.After introducing the major challenges our seminars were organized to address, the introduction will summarize and explain the articulation of the contents of this issue in the following three parts: (1) realigning liberalism in the context of globalization (with contributions by Nilüfer Göle, Alain Touraine, Albena Azmanova, Stephen Macedo, Zygmunt Bauman); (2) different paths: towards modernity and democracy from within different cultures and religions (Fred Dallmayr, Sadik Al Azm, Irfan Ahmad, Ibrahim Kalin); and (3) philosophical presuppositions of intercultural dialogue and multiculturalism (Maeve Cooke, Sebastiano Maffettone, Volker Kaul). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In social scientific studies of Europe's new democracies, there has emerged an analytical approach which transcends the teleology of 'transitology' and, focusing on the impact of culture and history, is sensitive to the contingencies and 'eventfulness' of social transformations. The main thrust of this article is that such a culturo-historical approach may prove useful not only in assessing the different results to which the processes of democratization lead at the national level, but also to assess the general direction of political change after 1989 towards democracy. Building on Eisenstadt's notion of modernity as a cultural and political program, this article therefore attempts to understand the revolutions of 1989 not only as the mere sum of particular national events, but also as part of an 'entangled history', that is, as a common, transnational phenomenon which was based on and articulated a shared cultural understanding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The European Union would like European citizens to be more involved in its political processes and to cast off its 'democratic deficit'. A functioning European public sphere has been seen as both a solution and an instrument for producing a European identity that might motivate more participation. The main question discussed in this article is what the medium of television can contribute and already has contributed to the construction and existence of a European public sphere. On the way to a (preliminary) conclusion, the article suggests definitions and understandings of the key terms involved and sketches an overview of transnational television in Europe. It then suggests that while the EU may challenge the nationalist idea that a polity must also be a 'complete' cultural community, and some seem to think a polity can do without any cultural community to speak of, one should rather think of the EU as a political project that gradually, over time, will add a 'European' layer to the identities of Europeans - not least due to the sort of everyday cultural community that television has contributed to since the early 1950s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Welfare states treat different groups of needy people differently. Such differential rationing may reflect various considerations of policymakers, who act in economic, political and cultural contexts. This article aims at contributing to a theoretical and empirical understanding of the popular cultural context of welfare rationing. It examines European public perceptions of the relative deservingness of four needy groups (elderly people, sick and disabled people, unemployed people, and immigrants). Hypotheses, deduced from a literature review, are tested against data from the 1999/2000 European Values Study survey. It is found that Europeans share a common and fundamental deservingness culture: across countries and social categories there is a consistent pattern that elderly people are seen as most deserving, closely followed by sick and disabled people; unemployed people are seen as less deserving still, and immigrants as least deserving of all. Conditionality is greater in poorer countries, in countries with lower unemployment, and in countries where people have less trust in fellow citizens and in state institutions. At the national level there is no relation with welfare regime type or welfare spending. Individual differences in conditionality are determined by several socio-demographic and attitudinal characteristics, as well as by certain features of the country people live in. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This commentary discusses some questions entailed in the Regina Day Langhout's (2005) article. The authors' point of view is an interpretative approach anchored in the European scholastic world, in particular that of Southern Europe with its Latin and Mediterranean culture. In the first part of the article we compare the model of school involved in Langhout's study with the South-West European one. In the second part, we deal with some epistemological and theoretical issues concerning the way cultural processes are investigated: the level/model of explanation of psycho-social context; the problems raised by the notion of intentionality; the limits of the functionalist interpretative schema of analysis. These issues are traced back to a basic topic: the position of the observer in respect of the cultural system analysed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Non-synchronous events are constitutive for the social. Every society has to institutionalize synchronicity over time to make a social order of the present possible. A social world of discontinuity (i.e. a non-synchronized world) is amended by a semantics of simultaneity (i.e. a synchronized world) which makes the non-synchronous appear as synchronous. From this follows that synchronicity is a necessary illusion. Cultures of synchronicity are powerful symbolic representations. The case of the New Europe is a particularly striking case. It synchronizes by standardization and by the timing of standardization which generates non-synchronicity at increasing speed. This is called the first face of Europeanization. The New Europe has to legitimate its non-synchronicity and make it appear as synchronicity. This is called the second face of Europeanization. Thus a culture emerges in which non-synchronicity and synchronicity are constructed simultaneously. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analyzes Benetton Co.'s 2000 advertising campaign 'We on Death Row' as a site of cultural production where ideological differences on capital punishment between the U.S. and Europe are played out. Mass-mediated public discourse framing the campaign in the prestige press; Textual analysis of stories and editorials about the campaign; Focus on how national hegemonic media frames domesticate foreign social ideals.

The EU has recently introduced a cultural policy. This includes symbolic initiatives, among which is the creation of the 'European Cities of Culture' (ECC), that are a primary example of EU attempts at awakening European consciousness by promoting its symbols, while respecting the content of national cultures. This goes together with the realization that the idea of 'Europe' as the foundation of an identity is key for the legitimization of the EU. This article addresses the question of European cultural identity as it is appropriated and shaped by the EU in the process of becoming an 'imagined community'. It is grounded on a critical systematization of current ideas of Europe as a cultural identity and on a fieldwork analysis of the nine ECCs in 2000. The article argues that if we are to appreciate how Europe is imagined, it is important both to take EU symbolic initiatives seriously, and to try and grasp the specificity of these symbols and the peculiar conditions of their use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the tension between an understanding of Europe as purveyor of a certain kind of cultural, spiritual or religious identity and the more or less bureaucratic project of European construction undertaken in its name. The central axis of this tension is the theoretical relationship between identity and legitimacy. The classical modern problem of nation-state building involves integrating the legitimating force of collective identity into the institutions of the state. How does the project of European construction respond to an analogous challenge? This article develops this theoretical question by turning to two canonical positions concerning the relation between institutional legitimacy and its cultural, spiritual or religious underpinnings — Montesquieu and Weber. It then returns to the founding documents of the EU in order to interrogate the legitimacy of the EU in light of the concept of European identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on the importance of maintaining a critical perspective and a possibility of a fruitful debate between globalization theory and youth cultural research in Europe. Notion of global youth culture; Construction of discipline to the youth; Transformation of cultural studies to the youth.

This article examines the impact of cultural codes on the conduct and outcomes of evaluation. Cultural codes are defined as symbols and systems of meaning that are relevant to members of a particular culture (or subculture).These codes can be utilized to facilitate communication within the 'inside group' and also to obscure the meaning to 'outside groups'. Drawing on the authors' combined experiences in Central and Eastern Europe, the article explores how cultural codes emerged in these contexts and the challenges they presented to the conduct and utilization of evaluation and to the evaluators themselves. Evaluators must be prepared, it is suggested, to unlock their own internal codes in relation to those of other cultures in order to create the appropriate socio-political relationships that are a prerequisite for learning and change. The article concludes with a discussion of the kind of partnerships and trust it is necessary to establish to underpin a mutual unlocking of codes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents a critique of the work of historian George Mosse. Work's coverage of aspects of the European experience; Mosse's approach to the study of cultural and intellectual history.

Presents an overview of the contents of the publication 'European Journal of Cultural Studies,' Volume 4(3), 2001. Role of history in the formation of cultural studies; Importance of cultural production and interpretation; Intersections of Black and Irish popular culture.