Travel for ordinary comforts

The article focuses on the co-constitution of political subjectivities, political regimes and global political economy by exploring experiences of international travel by ordinary Yugoslav citizens. Political non-players (Ashis Nandy (1998) The intimate enemy: loss and recovery of self under colonialism (New Delhi: Oxford University Press)) and their everyday practices are key protagonists in the narrative of border crossings, migrations, translocations and regime sustenance. Taking a cue from Peter Taylor's (Modernities (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999)) analysis of ‘ordinary modernity’, the article examines the ways in which foreign travel helped create ‘ordinary comfort’ for ‘ordinary citizens’ in the Yugoslav communist experiment. The temporal focus is on the 1970s—time of grave economic crisis in Western Europe and the United States—and, thanks to petro-dollar debt, the time of unprecedented prosperity and largesse in Yugoslavia. By looking at the variety of ways ordinary Yugoslavs travelled abroad and the representations of ‘abroad’ at home, the article explores the ways in which inostranstvo (the foreign world, the international) and its imaginary came to the rescue of the national, and how the liberty of travel (always contrasted to the ‘prison’ of other communist countries) obfuscated political and economic problems within.     

A Gender Perspective on Teachers as Crisis Managers

Stressful conditions affect communities at different levels and may involve occupational groups not normally associated with issues of crisis and security. Teachers in the compulsory school system are members of such a group. The purpose of this study is to examine teachers’ view of their own role as crisis management actors in a female-dominated occupation. A Grounded Theory approach applying a gender perspective was used as an analytical tool for data processing. In total, 16 informants from four different schools in two different municipalities in Sweden were interviewed. The analysis of these interviews shows that teachers’ perceptions of risk, crisis, and security are influenced and characterized by social and emotional regulation aimed at (a) reducing vulnerability, (b) increasing the sense of security, and (c) regaining or restoring a sense of order and control. These strategies have been discussed from a gender perspective as teachers do not regard themselves as legitimate crisis management actors.