Arianna Carta

Sexed & Raced Others / Passive Selves: the Construction of National Identity in a Hungarian Teachers' Training College Arianna Carta

In Sexed & Raced Others/Passive Selves: the Construction of National Identity in a Hungarian Teachers' Training College, Arianna Carta explores the intersections of racism, homophobia and nationalism showing how they work in a specific educational context. Based on ethnographic research in a Hungarian Teachers' Training College, the book shows how the teachers narratives about the Other reveal a national identity based on exclusion and self-victimization. This book reveals how a group of future teachers perceives the system as corrupted with no space for social change: in the framework articulated by the teachers, education is emptied of any progressive social role. Teachers feel fear and vulnerability as citizens which enables them to assume no responsibility for addressing social inequalities. This study shows how the legacy of communism with its construction of passive citizenship, the perception of state as corrupted together with a nationalist myth based on Greater Hungary, are essential in the production of raced and sexed others fostering values and ideas of unity based on exclusionary practices.