The politics of violence in post-communist films (Mircea Daneliuc, Romania, Lucian Pintilie, Lee Tamahori, New Zealand).

The thesis is centered around two Romanian post-communist films--- The Oak and The Conjugal Bed---while also addressing other aspects of the contemporary cultural spectrum. The films constitute a (pre)text for analysis and indicators of larger social phenomena. Using an eclectic cultural approach to post-communist phenomena, I position contemporary Romanian artifacts in relation to the communist inheritance, cultural traditions, and regional features. The thesis is structured to permit continuous dialogism among post-communism and post-colonialism, postmodernism, and feminisms. To emphasize the similarities and dissimilarities among these cultural trends, I have used the New Zealand Film Once Were Warriors as a background. The liminality of the post-communist transition is discussed in terms of its aesthetic and theoretical consequences, with emphasis on the fluidity of the critical approach which has to perpetually attune itself to the dynamics of the events. The aspects I have approached---internalized violence, the lack of positive forms of nationalism, the use of the absurd, grotesque imagery, (self-)irony, and laughter---constitute a dynamic, self-generating system of features. The presence of violence on screen is the outcome of a violent external factor of oppression---the imposition of Soviet communism---which has been internalized. The tacit involvement of the population through passivity led to heightened levels of guilt, national low self-esteem, and even an absence of a positive nationalist feeling. As liminal types of discourse, the absurd, the grotesque and laughter propose subversive alternatives to both the rigidity of the communist discourse and the stiffness of cheap nationalist optimism. Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 39-02, page: 0361. Adviser: B. R. Straus. Thesis (M.A.)--University of Windsor (Canada), 1999

Abanicos para el siglo XXI

Resenya: Abanicos para el siglo XX

Equal Opportunities and Treatment and the Real Training Needs of Adult Learners - A Case Study

AbstractAdult training in the field of equal opportunity and treatment is the main way of raising awareness, informing and promoting measures to prevent and fight discrimination in Romania. Contrary to many andragogical principles according to which adults learn if by learning they can solve specific personal problems, these training courses are generally designed starting from the global analysis of problems and needs of trainees. The case study referred to in this article was conducted as a result of a training initiative on equal opportunity and treatment for employees in the public administration (50 adult trainees, Timis County, Romania), which resulted in the identification of specific training needs for employees and local community members. To this end, we made a comparison between our initial training objectives and those redesigned based on the feedback from the participants. The conclusion of this contrastive approach was that, to have the desired impact, the goals and objectives of adult education courses must meet the real needs of the participants

The effects of training on Romanian migrants’ income: a propensity score matching approach

Training programs are an important tool of human resource management, especially in case of technological and organizational changes inside a company. According to the human capital theory, trainings generally lead to increased post-training wages. Having this into consideration, this paper aims to evaluate the effects of trainings on the Romanian migrants’ income by conducting propensity score matching, as a novelty in the field. Both the treatment group and the control group were selected from an online survey conducted in 2010 upon the Romanian migrants worldwide. The results confirmed the human capital theory, indicating that after attending trainings Romanian migrants should expect higher incomes