Segregated Schools, “Slow Minds” and “Must Be Done Jobs”: Experiences About Formal Education and Labour Market in a Roma Community in Romania

Based on a long-term ethnographic fieldwork, this study applies the cultural-ecological theory to understand reasons for making and maintaining a segregated school in a Romanian town, and those community forces which track and maintain Roma children there. As findings indicate, creating and sustaining such an institution reflects the flipsides of Romanian national policies, which due to the financing strategies and centralized curricula—involuntarily—block the chances to provide quality education to marginal groups. Tracking and staying of Roma children into such schools is a result of their parents’ ambivalent experiences with formal economic activities and formal education. Experiences with work and schooling shared by this urban group of Roma reveal that parents have clear expectations towards school: transmission of practical knowledge, good treatment and isolation of the school problems from family life, which not always can be fulfilled by the educational units.

Survival of the fittest: How the rice microbial community forces Sarocladium oryzae into pathogenicity

ABSTRACT The fungus Sarocladium oryzae (Sawada) causes rice sheath rot and produces the phytotoxins cerulenin and helvolic acid. Both toxins show antimicrobial activity but only helvolic acid production in the rice sheath correlates with virulence. S. oryzae isolates that differ in their toxin production were used to study their interaction with the rice culturable bacterial endophyte community. The diversity and community structure was defined in the edge of sheath rot lesions, followed by a null model-based co-occurrence analysis to discover pairwise interactions. Non-random pairs were co-cultured to study the nature of the interactions and the role of the toxins herein. Compared to healthy sheaths, endophyte diversity strongly increased when infected with the least virulent S. oryzae isolates producing low amounts of toxins. Virulent S. oryzae isolates did not affect diversity but caused strong shifts in species composition. The endophyte community of healthy rice plants was dominated by B. cereus. This bacterium was enriched in lesions produced by low-virulent S. oryzae isolates and caused hyphal lysis. Contrarily, helvolic acid producers eliminated this bacterium from the sheath endosphere. We conclude that S. oryzae needs to produce antibiotics to defend itself against antagonistic rice endophytes to successfully colonize and infect the rice sheath.

Sexual Abuse in a Korean Evangelical Church in Japan

A case of sexual abuse by the supervisor of the Central Church of Holy God (Seishin Chūō Kyōkai 聖神中央教会) in 2005 has led many in the Japanese Christian community and the media to question the “cultification” of the Christian church. This paper will consider the incident and its background, one negative aspect of “church growth” in Japan, in which Korean evangelical and Pentecostal churches competed vigorously to attract devotees. The pastor who founded this church was a Korean resident in Japan who had studied theology and the propagation methodology in South Korea, allowing him to realize church growth in notoriously non-Christian Japan. Yet, his top-down authoritative management suppressed believers’ spiritual and physical freedom of religion. In the following case study, I consider how the asymmetrical relations among church members contributed to this religious abuse. After taking into account issues of missionary training, proselytization methodology, and social strata, I suggest that a dysfunction within the “comprehensive religious community” forces members’ total dependence on pastors in their belief as well as their lives.

Conceptualizing community resilience to natural hazards – the emBRACE framework

The level of community is considered to be vital for building disaster resilience. Yet, community resilience as a scientific concept often remains vaguely defined and lacks the guiding characteristics necessary for analysing and enhancing resilience on the ground. The emBRACE framework of community resilience presented in this paper provides a heuristic analytical tool for understanding, explaining and measuring community resilience to natural hazards. It was developed in an iterative process building on existing scholarly debates, on empirical case study work in five countries and on participatory consultation with community stakeholders where the framework was applied and ground-tested in different contexts and for different hazard types. The framework conceptualizes resilience across three core domains: (i) resources and capacities, (ii) actions and (iii) learning. These three domains are conceptualized as intrinsically conjoined within a whole. Community resilience is influenced by these integral elements as well as by extra-community forces comprising disaster risk governance and thus laws, policies and responsibilities on the one hand and on the other, the general societal context, natural and human-made disturbances and system change over time. The framework is a graphically rendered heuristic, which through application can assist in guiding the assessment of community resilience in a systematic way and identifying key drivers and barriers of resilience that affect any particular hazard-exposed community.

Conceptualizing community resilience to natural hazards – the emBRACE framework

The level of community is considered to be vital for building disaster resilience. Yet, community resilience as a scientific concept often remains vaguely defined and lacks the guiding characteristics necessary for analysing and enhancing resilience on the ground. The emBRACE framework of community resilience presented in this paper provides a heuristic analytical tool for understanding, explaining and measuring community resilience to natural hazards. It was developed in an iterative process building on existing scholarly debates, on empirical case study work in five countries and on participatory consultation with community stakeholders, where the framework was applied and ground-tested in different contexts and for different hazard types. The framework conceptualizes resilience across three core domains: resources and capacities; actions; and learning. These three domains are conceptualized as intrinsically conjoined within a whole. Community resilience is influenced by these integral elements as well as by extra-community forces, comprising disaster risk governance and thus laws, policies and responsibilities on the one hand and on the other, the general societal context, natural and human-made disturbances and system change over time. The framework is a graphically rendered heuristic, which through application can assist in guiding the assessment of community resilience in a systematic way and identifying key drivers and barriers of resilience that affect any particular hazard-exposed community.

Diakonische Identität in einer pluralen Gesellschaft

Questions concerning the special identity of diaconal work in relation with the protestant churches cannot still be answered with a distinction between their specific character and other forms of social work and with a description of the Christian belief and motivation of the employees. Not even in the context of the modern society, but also with regress to the biblical sources especially in the New Testament, the confession of the inclusion of all men in human community forces an opening of the traditionally exclusive character of diaconal work for potentially all people, not only clients but also employees. This opening must theologically be well reflected and managed.

Community Forces, Social Capital, and Educational Achievement: The Case of Supplementary Education in the Chinese and Korean Immigrant Communities

Extraordinary Asian American educational achievement has often been credited to a common cultural influence of Confucianism that emphasizes education, family honor, discipline, and respect for authority. In this article, Min Zhou and Susan Kim argue that immigration selectivity, higher than average levels of premigration and postmigration socioeconomic status, and ethnic social structures interact to create unique patterns of adaptation and social environments conducive to educational achievement. This article seeks to unpack the ethnic effect through a comparative analysis of the ethnic system of supplementary education that has developed in two immigrant communities — Chinese and Korean — in the United States. The study suggests that the cultural attributes of a group interact substantially with structural factors, particularly tangible ethnic social structures on which community forces are sustained and social capital is formed. The authors conclude that "culture" is not static and requires structural support to constantly adapt to new situations.