The social construction of roma ethnicity in Bulgaria, Romania and Hungary during market transition

Ladanyi, J; Szelényi, Iván

doi:10.1556/revsoc.7.2001.2.5

Cited by 62 publications

(51 citation statements)

References 1 publication

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“…305-306). Dominant representations have produced 'the Roma' as an isolated and reified 'object of study', whereby Roma people (as reified minoritised 'communities') appear to be self-contained, hermetically sealed, and so radically different from everyone else that it becomes virtually impossible to recognise them as participants within wider social formations of migration or migrant networks, racialised 'minority' social formations, class formations of labour or precarity, urban neighbourhoods or trans-local socio-spatial formations, or any other modes of meaningful social belonging (Durst, 2010;Kaneva & Popescu, 2014;Ladányi & Szelényi, 2001;Simhandl, 2006). Roma seem to be always exquisitely alone, irreducibly separate and distinct, and by implication, their sociopolitical marginalisation comes to appear as the inevitable effect of their own intrinsic ('ethnic') singularity, if not their putative ('cultural') 'incorrigibility' (Fekete, 2014;van Baar, 2012; see also Kóczé, 2017;Solimene, 2017).…”

Section: The Roma As a Racial Formationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Un/Free mobility: Roma migrants in the European Union

2017

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This special issue showcases work that theorises and critiques the political, economic, legal, and socio-historical ('ethnic' or 'cultural') subordination of the European Roma (so-called 'Gypsies'), from the specific critical vantage point of Roma migrants living and working within and across the space of the European Union (EU). Enabled primarily through ethnographic research with diverse Roma communities across the heterogeneous geography of 'Europe', the contributions to this collection are likewise concerned with the larger politics of mobility as a constitutive feature of the sociopolitical formation of the EU. Foregrounding the experiences and perspectives of Roma living and working outside of their nation-states of 'origin' or ostensible citizenship, we seek to elucidate wider inequalities and hierarchies at stake in the ongoing (re-)racialisation of Roma migrants, in particular, and imposed upon migrants, generally. Thus, this special issue situates Roma mobility as a critical vantage point for migration studies in Europe. Furthermore, this volume shifts the focus conventionally directed at the academic objectification of 'the Roma' as such, and instead seeks to foreground and underscore questions about 'Europe', 'European'-ness, and EU-ropean citizenship that come into sharper focus through the critical lens of Roma racialisation, marginalisation, securitisation, and criminalisation, and the dynamics of Roma mobility within and across the space of 'Europe'. In this way, this collection contributes new research and expands critical interdisciplinary dialogue at the intersections of Romani studies, ethnic and racial studies, migration studies, political and urban geography, social anthropology, development studies, postcolonial studies, and European studies. Central to our approach in this special issue is a desire to re-situate questions of Roma mobility, and the consequently fluid and contradictory sociopolitical dynamics of Roma racial subordination, at the heart of any critical enquiry regarding 'Europe'. Roma mobility is particularly central to questions concerning EU-ropean citizenship, the borders of EUrope, the so-called 'migrant crisis' in Europe, and the rise of far-right, anti-immigrant racist populism across the space of Europe. That is to say, rather than fetishise research about 'the Roma' as such, as an essentialised 'ethnic group' to be studied in isolation, we insist that there can be literally no adequate investigation into the very meanings of 'Europeanness' or the politics of 'European' identity in the presumably wider field of

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Section: The Roma As a Racial Formationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Un/Free mobility: Roma migrants in the European Union

2017

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“…If samples in earlier surveys were based almost exclusively on external identification, more recent studies introduce community level heteroidentification as a principle, even if in selecting "Roma communities" they rely on information provided by NGOs, other experts or public officials. That expert categorizations, be it done by field operators or other Roma experts, do not coincide with self-ascription was shown by Ladányi and Szelényi (2001) in Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania. Yet, this magisterial empirical demonstration of the ambiguity of Roma identity and the inconsistencies of its measurement seems to have made little impression on policy researchers.…”

Section: Scholarly Contributions To the Gypsy Legacymentioning

confidence: 91%

Roma Identity as an Expert-Political Construction

Surdu¹,

Kovats

2015

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The creation of an EU Framework for national Roma integration strategies (2011) marks a significant step in the politicisation of Roma identity by ensuring a further increase in the number of initiatives, projects and programmes explicitly targeting Roma. The Framework itself is part of a process that began with postcommunist transition and which has produced historically unprecedented levels of Roma political activism along with a proliferation of national and transnational policy initiatives focussed on Roma identity. In seeking to explain this contemporary political phenomenon, the article argues that Roma is an identity constructed at the intersection of political and expert knowledge by various actors, such as policymakers, Romani activists, international organizations and scholars. This political-expert identity is applied to groups that are not bounded by a common language, religion, cultural practice, geographic location, occupation, physical appearance or lifestyle. The article explores how this collation of disparate populations into a notional political community builds upon a centuries-old Gypsy legacy. It scrutinizes five strands of identification practices that have contributed to the longue durée development of today's Roma as an epistemic object and policy target: police profiling of particular communities; administrative surveys; Romani activism; Roma targeted policies; quantitative scientific research. The article argues that the contemporary economic and political conditions amidst which the politicisation of Roma identity is occurring explain how the ideological and institutional construction of the ethnic frame tends toward the reinforcement of the exclusion of those categorised as Roma, thus increasing the perceived need for Roma policy initiatives. A self-sustaining cycle has been created where Roma knowledge identifies Roma problems requiring a policy response, which produces more Roma knowledge, more needs and more policy responses. Yet, there are consequences to racialising public discourse by presenting Roma as both problematic and essentially different from everyone else. Hostility towards Roma has increased in many states indicating that the expert framing of Roma groupness affects social solidarity by disconnecting and distancing Roma from their fellow citizens.

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“…It is important to note here that data on specic groups in general are often unreliable because classicatory systems are a social process that reects cultural dierences, especially across the classied and the classier (Ladanyi/Szelenyi 2001). There are 107,210 people declaring Roma nationality in Slovakia according to the 2010 census, but these data are generally considered unreliable due to the implications associated with Roma stigmatization.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ghettos in Slovakia. Confronting Roma Social and Enviromental Exclusion

Filčák¹,

Stager²

2014

Analyse &Amp; Kritik

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More than half of the Roma population in Slovakia lives in spaces that are segregated or separated from dominant non-Roma communities. The socio-spatial marginalization of Roma is both generated and reinforced through open and discrete social processes and measures largely orchestrated by local governments, enabled by an ineective state and reinforced by the general socio-economic policy framework. This article builds on extensive eld research on predominantly Roma-occupied spaces (i.e.,`settlements') in Slovakia and focuses on the nature and function of Roma segregation and separation in Slovakia from an ecological socio-political, and economic standpoint. Based on Loïc Wacquant's work on ethno-racial segregation and the concept of environmental justice, we discuss social and environmental discrimination as one of the constituent elements in understanding Roma socio-spatial marginalization and its functions, and employ the neologism,`hyper-osada' as a tool to conceptually and analytically investigate the new impetus and recent trajectory of Roma segregation and separation.

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The social construction of roma ethnicity in Bulgaria, Romania and Hungary during market transition

Cited by 62 publications

References 1 publication

Un/Free mobility: Roma migrants in the European Union

Un/Free mobility: Roma migrants in the European Union

Roma Identity as an Expert-Political Construction

Ghettos in Slovakia. Confronting Roma Social and Enviromental Exclusion

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