A Gender Perspective on Language, Ethnicity, and Otherness in the Serbian Higher Education System

As borders and political systems change, members of some nations become minorities, resulting in multifaceted changes to those communities. This paper draws on Otherness and intersectionality in problematizing the interplay of gender, ethnicity, and language within Serbian academia for ethnic minority female students. I examine the narratives of ethnic-minority Hungarian female students when they explain their experience of Otherness through language in the Serbian higher-education system. Additionally, I examine the narratives of Serb majority-female academics, when they narrate about their experience with the minority students who struggle with Serbian language skills. I highlight how language becomes an element of Otherness for the ethnic minority female students, and how it has a different effect in the social sciences and humanities (SSH) compared with science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. The paper raises important issues relating to research into gender and ethnic spaces of higher education systems in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE).