Karolina Lendák-Kabók. <i>National Minorities in Serbian Academia: The Role of Gender and Language Barriers</i>

Karolina Lendák-Kabók is a talented young scholar from the Hungarian minority in the province of Vojvodina/Vajdaság, Serbia. She currently holds a Marie Skłodowska-Curie postdoctoral fellowship at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest and is an assistant professor in the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Novi Sad/Újvidék. Her main research interest is the intersection of ethnicity and gender in the exploration of ethnic minorities in academia, with a focus onVojvodina. In her previous, edited, book, published in Hungarian as Üvegplafon? Vajdasági magyar (értelmiségi) női perspektivák [Glass ceiling? Vojvodina Hungarian (intellectual) women’s perspectives],1 she explored the question of Vojvodina Hungarian identity by applying methodologies of oral history and an intersectional approach to twenty-four life narratives of (younger) Vojvodina Hungarian intellectual women. In her new book, National Minorities in Serbian Academia: The Role of Gender and Language Barriers, Lendák-Kabók continues to apply intersectionality as both a theoretical and methodological tool. While recognizing that women in the academic world who belong to ethnic minorities are in a position of privilege given their higher socioeconomic status, the author posits that they still face marginalization and discrimination due to their minority background and their gender. Intersectionality allows the author to unmask the power structures and biases these women face in their careers, stemming from both their gender and ethnic identity, as they are locked into a position of otherness.Unlike in her earlier book, which looked only at ethnic Hungarian women, Lendák-Kabók now casts a wider net regarding the position of national minorities, in particular women, within Serbian academia in that she examines three ethnic groups (Hungarian, Slovak, and Romanian). Although there are numerous other ethnic groups (a total of twenty-five) living in this multiethnic region, the author justifies her choice of these three with the fact that, first, numerically they are among the largest minority groups; and, second, the three languages belong to different linguistic families while also being distinct from variations of Serbian/Serbo-Croat. She builds her research on the hypothesis that, despite the right to education in the mother tongue from kindergarten through high school as guaranteed by the Serbian Constitution, it is the linguistic difference that sets these minorities apart from the majority Serbian nation and leads to increased challenges and hurdles when it comes to building a successful career, starting with their postsecondary education. Lendák-Kabók sees the three ethnic minorities under scrutiny as juggling what Rogers Brubaker has called a “triadic nexus,” that is, being caught between two nationalisms: that of the nationalizing state in which they live and that of their “external national homelands” (6). One factor that contributes to the continuous dwindling of all three ethnic groups in Serbia is that around one-third of all high school graduates continue their education in Hungary, Slovakia, and Romania, respectively, resulting in a decades-long brain drain. Here the economic advantages of the EU play a significant role as well, since Serbia is still not an EU member state.Lendák-Kabók conducted data collection in two phases, followed by a combination of quantitative and qualitative methodology in her analysis. In the first phase of her data collection, she prepared a questionnaire that was sent to 2,192 Hungarian, Slovak, and Romanian high school graduates who had the opportunity to study in their mother tongue in Vojvodina. In the second phase, she conducted interviews with 45 Hungarian, Slovak, and Romanian minority women who studied or were teaching and/or researching at postsecondary educational institutions in Serbia, as well as with both Serbian women and men. She further gathered statistical data regarding the numbers of Hungarian, Slovak, and Romanian minority students at the various faculties of the University of Novi Sad, along with their gender structure.For clarification purposes, it has to be stated that in Serbia (unlike in Romania), there is no university where all subjects can be studied in any of the minority languages. Only at the University of Novi Sad is there an entire minority-language faculty—namely, the Faculty of Hungarian Language and Literature (Magyar Nyelv és Irodalom Tanszék), which trains teachers of Hungarian. It must be added that in Subotica/Szabadka, grade-school teachers can also be trained in Hungarian at the Faculty of Hungarian Teacher Training (Magyar Tannyelvű Tanítóképző Kar). At the University of Novi Sad, for decades there was also Hungarian education offered at the Faculty of Law, but this possibility no longer exists. In addition, there is a Faculty of Slovak Studies. For minority students, sometimes the possibility exists to be examined in their mother tongue in other subjects as well, if there is a professor available who speaks their language, but those are individual cases.Lendák-Kabók’s book is divided into an introductory chapter, followed by five analytical chapters, a conclusion, list of references, and an index. Chapter 2 focuses on the question of the impact of education in the minority languages on the respective communities, in addition to exploring what possibilities for higher education exist for the three groups under scrutiny. Importantly, the author also takes into consideration the impact of the National Councils in Serbia as well as the NGOs that are largely funded by the kin states (Hungary, Slovakia, and Romania). Chapter 3 then turns to the questions of gender in higher education by scrutinizing the deep-seated stereotypes and prejudices that prevail in Serbian academia (as they do in Serbian society at large) toward both women and ethnic minorities. In chapters 4 and 5 the author turns to the analysis of her data from the questionnaire and the interviews. Chapter 4 is interested in how language shapes the career paths of the ethnic-minority high school graduates and how it impacts their future education. Chapter 5 defines the language barrier as an ethnic “glass ceiling” for female students and professors of the three ethnic minorities at Serbian universities. Finally, chapter 6 looks at the position of women from both the ethnic minorities and the majority in Serbian academia and compares it with the position of ethnic-minority and -majority men. Through an analysis of the interviews, the author demonstrates the different strategies her subjects used when talking about their motivation or lack thereof to build a career in Serbian academia and to reach decision-making positions. She concludes that the strategies differ with respect to both gender and ethnicity, although on the whole, women were less interested in such positions. In the conclusion, the author summarizes her most important findings regarding what she sees as both nationality- and gender-based hierarchies in Serbian academe. Minority women in academia largely accept their position as both the gender- and ethnicity-based Other, and they seldom have the motivation or courage to stand up against both obvious and more hidden discrimination mechanisms. While women across the board are more interested in roles as educators and less in roles as researchers or administrators, ethnic-minority women are further kept in marginalized positions in their respective language and literature departments. The postsocialist neoliberal era has rendered the position of minority women and men even more difficult, given the higher performance demands and the pressure to serve three academic contexts: namely, the Serbian, the Hungarian, and the much smaller (e.g., Slovak or Romanian) Vojvodina communities, which can lead to being caught in “a no-woman’s land” (175).I would like to raise a minor point of criticism from a sociolinguistic point of view regarding the definition of ethnicity in this study. Ethnicity does not necessarily have to be tied to a distinct linguistic identity—that is, there are most certainly people in Vojvodina who identify as Hungarian, or Slovak, or Romanian and who may not speak their so-called mother tongue as their dominant language, or not speak it at all. In Lendák-Kabók’s book ethnic identity is always tied to linguistic identity: all her interview subjects identify as Hungarian, Slovak, or Romanian and speak the language too, even if they were born in mixed marriages. For the future study of these questions, I would recommend that the author consider a more nuanced approach, and explore how and why young women (and men) born to parents who are of different ethnic backgrounds define their ethnic identity. What determines their identification as Hungarian, for instance, if one parent is not an ethnic Hungarian? Do they identify through their paternal lineage (which would not be uncommon in a patriarchal society), that is, for example, if the father is Hungarian and they have a Hungarian last name? Such questions would add further dimensions to an intersectional analysis and complicate the self-identification of the interview subjects along single ethnic lines, taking into account hybrid ethnic identities, which are rather common in such a culturally rich and diverse region as Vojvodina/Vajdaság. Moreover, such a multilayered approach to ethnicity would also allow the raising of more complicated questions regarding discrimination and othering practices on the part of the majority population.On the whole, Lendák-Kabók’s study is very important, meticulously researched and analyzed with a competent familiarity with relevant theoretical texts, while supported by an impressive bibliography. This book is a major contribution to research on gender and ethnic spaces in higher education, not only in Serbia. Its results can be easily applied to other similar multiethnic contexts in Central and Eastern Europe, but also beyond.

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