Spain 2007

Madrid has experienced impressive dynamic economic growth in recent years, making the best of the positive business cycle in Spain. The capital region absorbs more than a half of the total FDI in Spain and has extended its economic relations with ...

This book explores the evolution of Spanish feminism in the context of European feminisms and institutions from the 1960s to recent times. Beginning with Sección Femenina, the official Francoist women's organization, Feminism, National Identity and European Integration in Modern Spain traces the interplay between Spanish women's policy and international policymaking. In some cases, as with the Sección Femenina-championed Law of Political Rights (Ley de Derechos) in 1961, Spanish women's policy at least appeared more progressive than what Western democracies offered – notable at a time when Spain was considered backward. After Franco's death in 1975, Spain's democratic transition seemingly consolidated forward-thinking women's policy with a Constitution that guaranteed equality of the sexes in 1978, and with the creation of a national bureau charged with crafting women's policy, the Instituto de la Mujer (Women's Institute), in 1983. Yet feminists found themselves marginalized in Spanish political decision-making, as Kathryn L. Mahaney argues so successfully in this study. Mahaney reveals that women ultimately influenced domestic policy not by acting within national networks but by leveraging European connections, particularly after Spain joined the European Economic Community (EEC) in 1986. The book shows that Spanish feminists worked through the EEC to gain international approval of policies that had met domestic opposition, and did so by representing them as necessary litmus tests of nations' democratic integrity. Their proposals were shaped by the specific context of Spanish feminism, but also by Spanish debates about what rights democracies should grant women and what equality in a post-fascist nation should encompass. This ground-breaking study explains that, in turn, these processes shaped both Spain's and the European Union's much-prized self-identities as democratic communities.

The current societal and social reality in Europe is undergoing far-reaching changes due to the phenomenon of migration. Educational policy and pedagogical practice play a key role in the academic support of immigrant children in schools. In this volume, the connections between societal change and educational issues in relation to two southern European nations, Spain and Italy, are analyzed. The stories of intercultural communication and integration of these two case studies focus on five themes: linguistic diversity, the performance gap, teacher training programs and school culture, the role of music education in multicultural and multilingual contexts, and the development of a supranational education as an improvement for multicultural education. The volume is of particular relevance for educational researchers, as well as for the interested general reader. It takes the reader to public and private entities in Italy and Spain, where intercultural education is part of societal discourse, and serves as a sounding board for the discussion of developments in other parts of Europe with similar demographics.

Provides a region-by-region guide to Spain including information on accommodations, shopping, and points of interest

This first OECD Skills Outlook presents the initial results of the OECD Survey of Adult Skills, which evaluates the skills of adults in 22 OECD and 2 non-OECD partner countries.

This unique critical sociolinguistic ethnography explores alternative migrant-regulated institutions of resistance and subversive communication technology: the locutorios or ethnic call shops. These migrant-owned businesses act as a window into their multimodal and hybrid linguistic and communicative practices, and into their own linguistic hierarchies and non-mainstream sociolinguistic orders. Here, socially displaced but technologically empowered transnational migrant populations actively find subversive ways to access information and communication technologies. As such they mobilise their own resources to successfully inhabit Catalonia, at the margins of powerful institutions. The book also focuses on the (internal) social organisation dynamics, as well as on the simultaneous fight against, and re-production of, practices and processes of social difference and social inequality among migrants themselves.

Drawing extensively on the author's archival research, this is the first major study in English of the first three and a half centuries in Spain of a people, its 'gitanos', who, despite their elevation by Spaniards and non-Spaniards alike to culturally iconic status, have until now remained invisible to history in the English-speaking world.