Ethnic and Minority Policy MA

Title

Ethnic and Minority Policy MA

Degree

Ethnic and Minority Policy Expert

Type

Degree program

Level

Master

Accreditation number

OH-FHF/138-4/2011.

Language

English

Duration

4 semesters (2 years)

ECTS credits

120

Minimum number of students

5

Maximum number of students

33

Short description

The goal of this program is to educate professionals who deal with minority issues and diversity in the region with regard to the integration process of Central and Eastern European countries, the Balkans and the Mediterranean region into the international community. With their gained knowledge in the fields of political science, law, sociology, anthropology, history and social policy they will be able to carry out decision-making, controlling, organizing and experting tasks at local governments, media organizations etc. independently or in team-work. The graduates have gained suitable theoretical and practical knowledge, interdisciplinary tasks and an international outlook in reference to minority politics. They are prepared to follow their studies on doctoral level.

This program is recommended to applicants who wish to deal with minority issues and ethnic diversity.

This program enables students to become trained professionals who have the insight and expertise to identify the main political, social and psychological reasons behind tensions and discriminations and who are also equipped with the skills and techniques to handle and moderate these conflicts.

Strength of program

The modern principle of multiculturalism, protection of minority rights, equal opportunities, anti-discrimination, and new challenges of inter-cultural integration of modern societies request more and more academics who intend to carry out research, or teach about ethnic diversity and inter-ethnic relations. In post-industrial welfare societies there is a growing need for policy makers or expert advisors in issues and conflicts between regions, nations, ethnic groups, minorities, and majorities in Hungary or various parts of Europe. There is a considerable need for these types of professionals today, and this demand in the future will even increase as the historical legacy of Eastern and Central Europe, the renaissance of the national spirit, the intense immigration, and frequent ethnic and minority conflicts make the task of managing and reducing ethnic tensions more and more important. We expect that our graduates can find jobs in the different public or private agencies like in public (governmental) organizations and the minority self-governments, in public education, in research institutes, in the media, in civil organizations and NGOs, and in all such programs and projects that aims to promote the successful social and cultural integration of minorities into the dominant society.

Find the structure of the program on this link.

Introductory Theoretical Courses

Nationalism and Ethnicity

The course’s aim is to introduce students in the field of nationalism, ethnicity and national minorities and to explain the theoretical framework of the topic. The course concentrates on the major theories and approaches to nationalism. Each class will start with a short lecture (30 minutes), where I will present the general framework of the topic. Students will have to present in 10-15 minutes one of the compulsory readings. This will be followed by discussions.

Requirements

Students will have to read one or two articles or chapters for each course (20-30 pages). Students are encouraged to approach systematically the topics and take actively part in the discussions. There will be a strong emphasis on the understanding of the theories, and less on their applicability for p

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Social Psychology of Intergroup Relations

The course will introduce into the crossroads of social psychology where individality and collectivity clash. The behavior in terms of intergroup relations implies the operation of the whole range of psychological, sociological, cultural and historical processes. The course has been designed to highlight the structure of malignant intergroup social psychological processes steeming from the intergroup experience. Categorization, stereotyping, prejudice, ethnocentrism, biassed attribution will be discussed in relation to disciplines other than social psychology. The approach is offering a multiplicity of viewpoints and will reveal the richness and diversity that characterize this field. Experiments, multimedia demonstrations, secondary analysis of empirical srudies related to the

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Theory of Migration

The course starts with an overview of the most relevant theories of migration. The secodn part of the course focuses on Europe and particularly East-Central Europe and covers issues such as migration potential, cross-border entrepreneurship and labour migration as well as trader tourism. The third part of the course deals with genral and policy issues such as discrimination, xenophobia, refugee policy, integration, citizenship, etc.

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Minority Rights and Minority Protection

The course aims at analysing the various rights-based approaches to recognizing minorities. As for instance: justification of minority rights, individual v. collective rights, discrimination and affirmative action, the security-based approach. That is also an important question, how these can be connected to the analysis of specific and specialized legal systems and institutions, which would include the assessment of indigenous rights, refugee protection, diaspora policies, legal conceptualization of minority identity and the processing of ethnic data. The seminars will also discuss the main documents of minority protection accepted by various international organisations (UN, Council of Europe, OSCE) and the accessible monitoring mechanisms. The lectures will deal with the

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Other Mandatory Courses

Minority Policy, Public Policy

The course gives an introduction to the public policy analyses of minority related issues. It gives an overview about the different dimensions and categorisations of policies and about the trends and theories of Europeanisation and multi-level governance. Discusses the phenomena of ethnic bias within the policy cycle and ethnic power sharing and highlights their effect through international examples on the everyday life of minorities in Europe. Finally it illustrates and analyses the European models of minority participation in policy making.

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Welfare safety net and minority

The course is designed to examine basic questions of social policy and the welfare state, with a special emphasis on the different minorities in Hungary and their disprivilaged situation. The course will cover the most important issues of the social security system and the current social policy measures in particular to the minority policy issues. The course syllabus: the concept and institutions of social policy, values and ideologis affecting social policy, welfare redistribution, welfare pluralism, poverty, unemployment, social desintegration, 'underclass', poverty policies and the current Hungarian social policy issues.

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Labor market, segregation, discrimination

The course starts with a genral overview of market places and labour market. The former focuses more on the development of a system-specific form of market place (the so called coemcon market), the latter with sociological processes and structures of the labour market such as segmentation, open air markets and black labour market. The second part of the course focuses on discrimination in general (poliocy and measurement problems), and with discrimination ont he labour market in particular.

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Minorities in the Media

The course introduces directions of contemporary media and culture studies. It focuses especially on the most important concepts, questions and theories of media and cultural studies' minority aspects. According to interdisciplinarity of cultural studes, students will be introduced to relevant cultural anthropological, political and historical researches in the theoretical and practical field of the minority policy and media topic.

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Specific Professional Courses

Cross National Comparison of National and Ethnic Identity

The general aim of the course is to introduce students to the various concepts of nation and ethicity, and to discuss the most relevant sociological, historical and socio-psychological aspects of national or ethnic identities. The context is mainly the Central and Eastern European region, but also aims to analyze the Western European and overseas comparative context of national identity. The course first introduces students into the most basic theoretical questions, and next analyze the stock of knowledge of national identity based on comparative empirical research experiences. The comparative data analysis through the semester is based on a survey series conducted in 1995 and 2003 in more than 20 countries from all over the world. In this study, more than 30,000 people were

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Inter-ethnic Relations in Europe

This course will focus on historical, sociological and social psychological determinants of the formation of ethnic and national identities and conflicts in the Carpathian Basin. The course is based on a database from a cross-national sociological survey that had been carried out in 3 different countries of the region between 1997 and 2000. The Carpathian Project provides a comparative analysis of the reciprocal attitudes of Hungarians and Slovaks in Slovakia, Hungarians and Romanians in Romania, and Slovaks and Hungarians in Hungary. A huge quantity of data obtained through standard questionnaires enables us to study the ethnicity - minority – nationality issue in depth, and to re-evaluate the findings of our prior ethno-psychological research.

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The situation of Romany minority in Central Europe

The course deals with a social status of the largest ethnic minorthy called the roma in Hungary and in Central and Eastern Europe. During the course, student will be intruduce to social-demographic backgound, financial status, education, labour market position, mobility of roma minority. Great emphasis is laid on poverty, deprivation, segregation, marginalisation and openness to social integration.

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Educational Disadvantages and Discrimination of the Romany Students at School

The course offers an introducation to modern policy of education. Based on recapitulation of former knowledge of the field it discusses the impact of cultural and subcultural variation of students’ family background ont he relations to school, on the attitude of school staff to students and their families. It extends to results of different educational policies in diminishing inequalities concerning education as well as to the efficiency of social actors in influencing educational policy decisions. It also gives an overview of experiences in scolarisation of Roma children in Europe and in Hungary, and the relationship between european conceptions concerning education in general and education of minorities in particular.

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Anti-Semitism: a Historical, Social Psychological and Sociological Approach

The course starts with the introducion of Hungarian Jewry from social-historical, historical, judicial, political and economical aspects. Attention will be drawn to the main connections between these aspects. After the overwiew of the assimilative tendencies in the 19. Century and the discriminative ones in the 20. Century, studens will be introduced to the social-history of contemporary Hungarian Jewry. The aim of the couse is to make students capable of aproaching the topic from different angles.

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Religiousness, Religious Minorities, Religion Politics in Central Europe

The course deals with religion in terms of minority status. Its main topics are large churches, sects and other religious communities, the contents of religiosity in Modernity, the issues of faith and faithlessness, and the relation between religious communities and subcultures.

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Gender studies and feminism

The aim of the course is to give a brief introduction to those theories which are dealing with the emergence and existence of gender-based inequalities. Studying these theories will present us that how many different causes, approaches and points of view can emerge when theorists would like to explain the so-called ‘gender order’.

Besides the theoretical aspects of the gender inequalities we will deal with the political aspects of it, too. The course will also present some gendered and political problems (e.g. violence against women, reproduction politics) and the different kinds of solutions as well. We will also pay attention to the well-known intersections between class, gender and ethnicity.

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Current Minority Problems

With ever-changing quest lecturers from foreign countries the seminar is dealing with the most current issues of ethnicity and minorities in different cultural and political environments. The lectures will give an insight into the analysis of intercultural and interethnic relations with sociological and social psychological background, and present the possible alternatives and procedures for managing conflicts as well as all the policy options and tools that today in the world's in various countries are applied

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People Living with Disabilities

Topics for discussion: models of disability, historical aspects of disability, deinstitutionalization in the USA and in the Nordic countries, disability in Central East Europe before and after 1989, disability and human rights (legal capacity, right to vote, involuntary treatment, parenting), medicalization of the society.

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Sexual minorities

The aim of the course is to introduce students to the social and legal situation of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersex (LGBTQI people) in contemporary European societies. The course will use an interdisciplinary perspective combining social scientific insights with a human rights based public policy approach. Students will get familiar with the fundamental theoretical debates concerning sexual and gender identities, understand the social and cultural roots of cis/heteronormativity, learn about international human rights norms concerning sexual orientation and gender identity, and analyze current social and policy debates concerning their implementation. The course will improve students’ ability to think critically on controversial social issues, apply social

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Refugees and asylum seekers

The course is based on different empirical researches dealing with migrant communities in Hungary. The main focus of the seminar is to analyize the different migration strategies of the immigrants from the persepectives of political sciences, economics, sociology and cultural studies. We will discuss in detail the alternative strategies of migrants to get integrated like the mechanism of assimilation, segregation, and integration, the diaspora context and the new transnational migration trends. Also we will touch the question of hospitality of the host society and the phenomena of xenophobia toward foreigners.

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Practical Courses

Introduction to quantitative research methods

The aim of the course is to provide students with a practicum experience applying multivariate statistical techniques to the analyses of any data set. Although some of the mathematical foundations of the considered statistical procedures will also be introduced, the main aim is to get practical knowledge about the multivariate data analyses techniques of sociological data. It is also important to understand that what kind of variables and which methods can be used to answer a given question or to explore a given problem. This course is followed by Multivariate statistical analysis 2.

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Multi-level statistical methods

The aim of this course is to provide students knowledge about advanced multivariate statistical methods, and the main theoretical and research principles connectied to them. A great emphasis will also be put on model building. Among the multivariate methods cluster analysis, discriminant analysis, logistic regression and logliear models will be covered.

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Qualitative research methods

The course aims to discuss theoretical issues and practical details of qualitative research methods applied in social sciences, particularly in social psychology. The class will be based on discussing a set of classical and contemporary readings in qualitative methods. As a starting point we will analyze some conceptual and historical issues regarding qualitative research methods. Then, we will discuss a set of theoretical perspectives, such as discourse analysis, grounded theory, discursive psychology, and narrative psychology. Finally, we will discuss in detail some procedure of qualitative research: participant observation, creating and analyzing transcriptions, computer aided discourse analysis, various interview techniques, visual analysis, etc. Parallel to working on the

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Academic English reading and writing

This course will provide students with the opportunity to practice English writing on a regular basis. Students are asked to write weekly assignments (minimum one page) and to submit them to me (printed out) at the beginning of each class. Every week we will make use of one participant’s assignment as the basis of a critical and developmental exercise and discussion of challenges. In this sense, the seminar will be run as a writing workshop. I will read all assignments for the next week. The classes will be driven by our discussions, and I thus encourage you to come to class with queries and points for debate in hand. We will use the seminar to develop papers you are working on this semester, with the goal of producing quality work that is fit for publication. I encourage e

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Thesis and final exam preparatory course

The course consists of two seminars. The first one is a thesis writing workshop in which the students present their thesis drafts and general guidelines are given about how to write a proper thesis.

The second workshop is shortly before the final exam and thesis defense in which students can ask their possible questions about the runoff of the final exam.

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Freely selected other courses

Internship

Thesis writing

Career opportunities

In the age of global migration processes and inter-ethnic conflicts fueled by an increasing level of nationalism, Ethnic and Minority Policy experts are more than simply needed in various fields of studies and work. Both governmental and non-governmental offices and organizations dealing with ethnic or other kinds of minorities, migrants, and refugees provide our students with possible future career possibilities.
Besides these institutes, local offices of different international organizations also employ experts on ethnic and minority issues. We expect that our graduates can find jobs in different public or private agencies like in public (governmental) organizations and the minority self-governments, in public education, in research institutes, in the media, in civil organizations and NGOs, and in all such programs and projects that aim to promote the successful social and cultural integration of minorities into the dominant society.

Job examples

Project managers, policy makers, researchers, field coordinators.

EU/EEA students
non-EU/EEA students
Tuition fee/semester

1300 EUR

3000 EUR

Application fee

For February intake: EUR 100 (non-refundable) For September intake: EUR 80 (non-refundable) between 01/10/2023-15/11/2023 EUR 100 (non-refundable) between 16/11/2023-30/04/2024 EUR 120 (non-refundable) between 01/05/2024-31/05/2024

For February intake: EUR 100 (non-refundable) For September intake: EUR 80 (non-refundable) between 01/10/2023-15/11/2023 EUR 100 (non-refundable) between 16/11/2023-30/04/2024 EUR 120 (non-refundable) between 01/05/2024-31/05/2024

non-EU/EEA students
Tuition fee/semester

3000 EUR

Application fee

For February intake: EUR 100 (non-refundable) For September intake: EUR 80 (non-refundable) between 01/10/2023-15/11/2023 EUR 100 (non-refundable) between 16/11/2023-30/04/2024 EUR 120 (non-refundable) between 01/05/2024-31/05/2024


Offered for the next academic year

Yes

Start program

02, Sep, 2024

Deadline for applications - September intake

31, May, 2024

Is there a February intake

Yes

Deadline for applications - February intake

15, Nov, 2023


Admission requirements

Entry requirements

BA/BSc degree in Social Studies, Sociology, Social Work, Politology, Cultural Anthropology, Social Pedagogy. In case of other bachelor degrees: individual consideration. 

Language requirements

Minimum level of language proficiency (both written and oral): B2

IELTS Score: 5.5
TOEFL IBT Band: 46-59
Cambridge English Scale Score: 162

Minimum level of language proficiency (oral) (A1-C2): B2

Minimum level of language proficiency (written) (A1-C2): B2

Further comments:

A Hungarian state accredited language certificate is required in one of the following languages:
English, Bulgarian, Greek, Croatian, Polish, German, Armenian, Roma, Romanian, Ruthenian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Ukrainian language certificate.
Or an equivalent diploma (university degree or secondary school certificate about studies conducted in the given language).

If the applicant can prove that they completed their former education entirely in English by submitting a notarized attestation and a detailed academic transcript, no further proof of language knowledge will be required throughout the admission process.

The applicant’s English knowledge will also be assessed during the admission interview.
Any letter of acceptance issued by the Faculty of Social Sciences is based on the verified fact that the applicant’s command of English has been assessed; therefore, they are considered eligible to pursue their studies at the institution.

Documents to submit with application
Document
Bachelor-level degree
Transcript of records
Copy of the main pages of the passport (needs to be valid)
Motivation letter
Copy of application fee transfer
Language certificate
Further comments (if needed)

Applicants must have a BA/BBA degree in any of the following areas: social studies, sociology, social work, political science, cultural anthropology. In case of other bachelor degrees: individual consideration.

Application procedure

The application starts at the online application system. Students need to register in the system, fill in the online application form, upload the required documents and follow the instructions during the application process.

After considering the applications we will inform the applicants about the exact date of the examination that will be organized via Skype.

Students who (also) hold Hungarian citizenship must apply through felvi.hu Please note that if an application is submitted not according to the aforementioned, it will be rejected. 

Procedure of the entrance examination:

The application deadline refers to the final submission of the complete application package through the online system.

For the September intake, there are three application periods:

  1. Early Bird Period: October 1, 2023, to November 15, 2023, 23:59 (CET)
  2. Regular Period: October 16, 2023, to April 30, 2024, 23:59 (CET)
  3. Last Call Period: May 1, 2024, to May 31, 2024, 23:59 (CET)

These distinct periods allow applicants the flexibility to submit their applications at their convenience. All applicants within each period have an equal chance of gaining admission to the program.

After each application deadline, the Admission Board reviews the applications. After the admission interview, applicants are informed of the selection outcome through the online application system within approximately one month. Admission letters are expected to be sent out through the online application system until the end of June. For February intake and Early Bird applications, admission letters are expected to be sent out through the online application system until the end of December.

Based on the results, certain students may be placed on a waiting list. Final results are expected by the first half of August (September intake).

Type of entrance examination: oral
Place of entrance examination:  online

Further details of the entrance exam:
Applicants with a full application package will be notified about the exact time and date of application interviews conducted via Skype or Ms Teams. Applicants are responsible for having technically suitable conditions for the interview from their side.
Applicants are expected to be prepared taking questions regarding the compulsory admission materials (see: Required readings for the entrance exam) from the side of admission committee composed of a professor, a lecturer and a student representative.

Required readings for the entrance exam:

  • Eriksen, Thomas Hylland. 2010. „1. What is Ethnicity?” In Ethnicity and Nationalism. Anthropological Perspectives. 1-23.  London, New York: Pluto Books.

  • Eriksen, Thomas Hylland. 2010. „6. Nationalism.” In Ethnicity and Nationalism. Anthropological Perspectives. 117-146.  London, New York: Pluto Books.

  • Okin, Susan Moller. 2004. „Multiculturalism and feminism: no simple question, no simple answers.” In Minorities within Minorities. Equality, Rights and Diversity edited by Eisenberg, Avigail and Jeff Spinner-Halev. 67-89.

  • Pettigrew, Thomas F. 1998. „Reactions Toward the New Minorities of Western Europe.” Annual Review of Sociology 24: 77-103.

Program leader

Dr. Miklós SZABÓ
Assistant professor

Program coordinator

Florian SIMON
Position: Department Administrator
E-mail: florian.simon@tatk.elte.hu

Csenger KERTAI
Department Administrator
E-mail: kertai.csenger@tatk.elte.hu

International Office, Faculty of Social Sciences
E-mail:  international@tatk.elte.hu

More information

Faculty Website
Facebook page of the Faculty of Social Sciences
Facebook page of the Ethnic and Minority Studies
Brochure

Faculty of Social Sciences

Faculty of Social Sciences

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