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Through their bodily interaction with the designed environment, disabled people can detect obstacles and appreciate spatial qualities architects may not be attuned to. While designers in several disciplines acknowledge disabled people as lead or critical users, in architectural practice their embodied experience is hardly recognized as a valuable resource for design. In this article, we therefore investigate what professional architects could learn from disabled people. To this end, the article reports on a field study, set up to explore ways of mobilizing disabled people's embodied experience to inform architectural practice. Analysis of the field study's outcome suggests that mobilizing this experience does not only add nuance to the existing accessibility standards, but also offers architects rich insights into building qualities that surpass these standards.

In the book "White But Not Quite: Central Europe's Illiberal Revolt" by Ivan Kalmar, the author examines recent developments in Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic through the lens of racism. Kalmar argues that Central Europe has been denied the opportunity to become "fully white" due to Western Europe's racist attitudes towards the region. He attributes the rise of illiberal politics in Central Europe to the colonial tendencies inherent in Europe's political and economic transformation since 1989. Kalmar's book provides vivid examples of how illiberalism in the region is intertwined with inequality and prejudice, but leaves some unanswered questions about the uniqueness of illiberal movements and the forces driving racial capitalism. [Extracted from the article]

The impact of the eastward enlargement of the European Union (EU) on the position of the Ukrainian minority in Poland is examined. It is observed that the Ukrainian minority activism in Poland has not benefited much from the firm Polish support for Ukraine in the EU context.

Activists who take up the cause of marginalized and discriminated cultural groups often find themselves in an ambiguous position in relation to the very people whose interests they seek to represent. Inspired by the ideas of multiculturalism, minority advocates turn the cultural identity of marginalized and discriminated minorities into the central focus of a political struggle for recognition. By so doing, however, they construct a particular sectional minority identity that not only fails to give full expression to individual identities, but is usually also 'stigmatized' in the sense that it is popularly associated with standard stereotypical images and negative characteristics. This article identifies this ambiguity in contemporary projects of minority rights advocacy aimed at redressing the social and economic grievances of the Roma in Central Europe. It shows how activists in the articulation of their claims rely on essentialist assumptions of Romani identity. While these minority rights claims resonate well in international forums, they also run the risk of reifying cultural boundaries, stimulating thinking in ethnic collectives, reinforcing stereotypes, and hampering collective action. By reviewing some of the recent literature on multiculturalism in social and political theory, this article explores ways of dealing with this ambiguity. It concludes that minority advocacy for the Roma can avoid the tacit reproduction of essential identities by contesting the essentializing categorization schemes that lie at the heart of categorized oppression and by foregrounding the structural inequality that drives political mobilization. Key Words: minority rights, Roma, Central Europe, advocacy, marginality

The level of political mobilization among ethnic minorities in Central and Eastern Europe has often been regarded as directly dependent on the strong or weak ethnic identity of the groups involved. Less attention has gone to the role of ethnic leaders in creating ethnic group identities for political purposes. This article explores the influence of political mobilization on ethnic group formation in the case of the Roma (Gypsies) in the contemporary Czech and Slovak Republics. It examines the various ways in which Romani activists in these two countries have 'framed' Romani identity. The article suggests that activists' conceptions of Romani identity are closely tied to their political strategies. At the same time, Romani activists have not been able to gain complete control over the production of Romani identity. They have had to deal with powerful schemes of ethnic categorization promulgated by the media, public officials and policy documents. Keywords: Collective identity; ethnic politics; ethnic mobilization; framing processes; Roma (Gypsies); Czech and Slovak Republics.

Abstract In recent years the European Union (EU) has applied its `political' criteria for accession as an instrument to positively influence policies on minority issues in the candidate member states [...]

Architectural design as collaborative practice relies on using representational artefacts. However, these artefacts and their use are prone to a visual bias, which may pose problems in co-designing with vision impaired people. This article studies how we can develop representational artefacts to support a discussion between architects and blind people, and how these artefacts mediate the discussion. We performed a 3-month focussed ethnography using participant observation in an architectural design firm involved in a competition design. In agreement with the architects, we introduced two blind persons as user/expert at distinct moments. Together, we developed and tested visuo-haptic design representations. We analyse how these representations were conceived and used. We first discuss how the representations perceptually and cognitively support verbal and gestural communication. Secondly, we explain why, after having analysed their use in a design meeting, we move from the term 'tactile model' to 'visuo-haptic model'. And thirdly, we discuss how the ownership of the models shifts and how that relates to the ownership of the design. To conclude, visuo-haptic design representations can support aspects of co-design with blind people, but raise further questions regarding the role of representation in co-design in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]