Archive for: Studies

The paper addresses the issue and theoretical articulations of religious tolerance, overviewing theoretical approaches of various authors – starting with the period of enlightenment. In that sense, we analyse the standpoints of John Locke, François Marie Arouet, Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Stuart Mill, Andrew Heywood, John Rawls, Žolt Lazar, Aleksandar Prnjat and Đuro Šušnjić. At the end of the paper we give a short summary of the 18th century Habsburg Monarchy relation towards freedom of religious beliefs, bearing in mind minority status of the Serbian community of Orthodox religion.

Theatre Audience in Serbia was a project of the 2009 Centre for Studies in Cultural Development activity plan. Its first phase devoted to drama audience is completed. Its second phase will deal with the opera and ballet audience (the Belgrade National Theatre). This paper presents findings of the research of the drama theatre audience of all professional theatres in Serbia.The analysis of the structure of drama audience of all professional theatres in Serbia resulted in establishment of all its relevant socio-demographic characteristics. Females dominate in drama audience (almost 2/3) over males (a bit more than 1/3). The majority of audience is 31 to 45 of age; minority of above 65. The fact that the majority of audience is 31-45 of age (27.1%) shows that almost two thirds (65.3%) of the drama audience belogs to the 19-45 age group. The majority of audience has university education (43.1 %), 27.7% secondary, and 11.7% higher. The number of M.A.s is only 7.6 %, while the other education levels individually do not exceed three percentage. As for the professional structure, the greatest percentage is of the experts and students. Among the most important findings of the research is that professional theatres in Serbia have the opportunity to improve the number of their audience by higher quality of their work and communication with the public. It is founded that a good Web (Internet) presentation is necessary if a theatre is to follow communication and information trends of the today information society. The professional theatres in Serbia could count on an approximately 15% of regular audience, but also on a twice as much of potential regular one, as a “reservoir” of a better and more stable attendance. The most usual reasons of random attendance are not related to a theatre activity and its characteristics, but to socio-economic conditions of the audience and dominant social value orientations.We hope that the theatres and their protagonists and the researchers will be the greatest beneficiaries of this research findings. The former to improve their activities; the latter to further investigate this highly important segment of cultural life. When this type of research is obviously rare, the findings of this particular one could contribute to a better understanding of the position and perspectives of theatres in our cultural and social reality, that might lead to their bigger and more stable audiences..

This paper discusses major findings of the research project “Profession at a Crossroads – Journalism at the Threshold of the Information Society” conducted by the Faculty of Political Sciences, Center for Media and Media Research, from July 2010 to June 2011. The aim of the project was to examine social, economic and technological qualities of the journalist community in Serbia and its capacity to respond to challenges the profession is faced with regarding global media changes and domestic transitional processes. Research results indicate that journalism in Serbia is in a state of limbo and caught between delayed transition and the information society, and that it very slowly mobilizes resources to respond to the forthcoming challenges.

We live in a consumer society, which imposes conformism as a necessary and desirable characteristic of personality. Rare are those, both young and elderly, who follow and critically approach things, rather than blindly absorbing them. However, one of the aims of humanistic pedagogy is to develop self-actualizing personalities. It is essential for each person to develop a critical sense of consuming different contents, including the media ones. This paper emphasizes implications that television may have for developing interests of the young. Television is one of the leading factors that influence young people in the broadest sense, including their interests. This was merely an attempt to explain the influence of television on the young, development mechanisms and their periodization, as well as the link between television and interests. Our research confirms that television influences developing interests of young people and that the frequency of broadcasting particular content increases the amount of interest in that content. Furthermore, the young show a great amount of interest in television contents related to entertainment and sport. However, it is denied that interests in particular television contents reflect other interests of the young. Various matters still remain disputable, such as: critical opinion on different contents in the media, quality of television contents, passivity of the young, their interest in participating in entertainment shows, dilemmas on taking part in educational shows and using educational television contents as a motive for studying harder.