Historicizing Roma in Central Europe Between Critical Whiteness and Epistemic Injustice (original) (raw)
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2016
This research aims to explore and critically challenge how discourses and narratives explain and justify the inequalities experienced by so many Roma children in Hungary when it comes to schooling. Taking a top down perspective, the focus will not be the lived experiences of Roma children, but rather the critical analysis of the prevalent ways of thinking about the XIV 1 In this thesis I will use mostly the term Roma and also Roma/Gypsy. I am aware that these terms encapsulate and group under one single name a multitude of social, cultural, economic, historical, political and linguistic experiences and people sharing those experiences. I am aware that this identity interacts with others, mitigating some aspects of one's experience or doubling the effect of a prospective negative influence. I will later elaborate on this complexity and the importance of naming from a discourse analytical perspective. So, when I use Roma, Roma people, Roma population, Roma children, this understanding and the complexity pertaining to it will be present behind the name and its meaning. With this, I will simultaneously enweave this notion into the fabric of this project until its end. 7 It was also inserted into the Constitution and Kállai himself was filling in this position until the government abolished it in 2011. (Kállai 2005) 8 The Race equality directive defines direct discrimination as the "less favourable treatment on grounds of racial or ethnic origin" while indirect discrimination is understood as a situation or a process where an apparently neutral provision, criterion or practice would put persons of a racial or ethnic origin at a particular disadvantage compared with other persons, unless that provision, criterion or practice is objectively justified by a legitimate aim and the means of achieving that aim are appropriate and necessary." (Concil Directive 2000/43/EC 2000, Article 2(2) in ERRC p. 15) 9 ERRC is the abbreviation which stands for European Roma Rights Centre 'Felzárkózás' as help with terms and conditions ME: As the first question, I would like steer the word to, how would you define the comprehensive aim of the Roma's felzárkóztatás (to be made convergedthis is a factitive form).
2014
This dissertation seeks to unpack how the two dominant images-'bad Gypsies' and 'good Roma'-developed and are mobilized in formal and informal educational institutions in Hungary and Russia and how those are perceived by Roma/Gypsies themselves. The former ethnic category has evolved over centuries, since Gypsies were increasingly defined as the quintessential 'Other', associated with resistance to authority, criminality, lack of education and discipline, and backwardness. The latter image has been advanced over the last few decades to counter negative stereotypes latent in the 'Gypsy' label. Various non-state actors are promoting a new image, that of proud, empowered, and educated 'good Roma'. Mobilization of both images is distinctly recognizable in schools-it is in formal and informal educational institutions where the 'bad Gypsy' image is most visibly sustained and reproduced, while these sites are also supposed to be indisputable tools of empowerment and positive identity building. Relying on approximately 12 months of fieldwork in Hungary and Russia, the study pursues three goals. First, it examines the origins, institutionalization, and deployment of ethnic labels used to categorize Roma. I show that two images, 'bad Gypsies' and 'good Roma that are contradictory in content, were reified and v essentialized. Second, it investigates the mechanisms of imbuing Roma youth with normative values of these ethnic labels in formal and informal educational institutions through school instructions, curricular and extra-curricular activities, disciplinary practices, and discourse. Third, it assesses Roma response and techniques of coping to the given essentialized images about their group identity. Overall, the dissertation is composed of two sections: a historical and contemporary examination of Roma identity formation and ethnic labeling practices. I interrogate issues of nationhood, belonging, and identity politics surrounding the Roma minority by in depth study of identity formation and construction of exclusionary nationhood in Russia and Hungary. Any attempt to understand contemporary European political, economic, and social conditions cannot ignore the Roma, an issue that requires an urgent sustainable solution. Improving Roma living conditions and elimination of prejudice against Roma requires a holistic approach and a comprehensive understanding, which is the ambition that this study pursues.
Invincible racism the misuse of genetically informed arguments against roma in central and eastern
Romani Studies, 2024
IIn this article, we challenge the idea that the development and the dissemination of scientific knowledge about Roma can be understood as “Eastern” or “Western.” Instead, we argue that the classical division between “science” and “pseudoscience” has the potential to fuel scientific racism and political and social exclusion across the globe. We narrate, for the first time, the role of sociobiology in the development of Roma “race science,” highlighting the ways in which its networks are developed and maintained. These specific mechanisms underlying the production of knowledge and its social and ideological effects may have further applications, such as the spread of mis- and dis-information. Our intent is to examine the attempts to deconstruct sociobiology and its application to Roma, by focusing on the effect of selective awareness among critics of sociobiology, which inevitably leads to the use of epistemic filters and heightens the risk of producing epistemic injustice.
Towards Critical Whiteness in Romani Studies
Roma Rights 2 2015: Nothing About Us Without Us? Roma Participation in Policy Making and Knowledge Production http://www.errc.org/roma-rights-journal/roma-rights-2-2015-nothing-about-us-without-us-roma-participation-in-policy-making-and-knowledge-production, 2015
The vision held out by this paper is to seek to transform non-Romani identity from one that is ‘preserved in aspic’, unaware and ultimately detrimental to both Romani and non-Romani people, into one that is engaged with and questioning its own historical roots and prejudices and seeks to actively overcome these through thoughtful and deliberate action. Romani activists and academics have indicated repeatedly that they would welcome a dialogue with non-Roma who are willing to move beyond the exclusions that have been foisted upon them by a history of oppression.
There are few explanations of why the Roma were segregated in socialist Czechoslovakia, and this lack of understanding is a considerable obstacle when attempting to prevent such discrimination and aggression; placement into residential care, eviction, sterilization, and the forced removal of children from their families are but some examples of violence that once plagued the Roma in Czechoslovakia. This text discusses the connection between the procedures that limit the Roma people’s rights and the arguments in favor of such limitations, which are formulated within the matrix of institutionalized violence. Today, human rights activists focus on changing procedures that regulate access to welfare and struggle to remedy organizational flaws that foster institutional violence, but developing alternatives to these procedures also challenges the ways Roma are perceived and the social practices directed at them. The pro et contra arguments matter – especially in the case of a long history of disempowerment as experienced by the Roma in the Czech lands. Whether the socialist policy toward Roma was part of a consistent plan for segregation or just a ‘bad shot’ in attempting to integrate them is a hotly debated topic. In 2007, the case of D.H. v. Czech Rep divided the European Court of Human Rights judges into two camps – the majority had agreed that the placement of Roma children into special schools should be defined as segregation, but four judges disagreed and highlighted the necessity to take into account historical contexts, demonstrating perhaps the intention to solve the issue of educating Roma children. It is reasonable to agree with those who do not see segregation and placement into special schools as one and the same thing, but those who aimed to prove that segregation was based on statistical data (i.e. the amount of Roma children placed in boarding schools for the mentally disabled, which was a key topic in the D.H. case) could not provide a comprehensive analysis of the transformation of special education into a controlling surveillance tool. What, then, made such practices agents of segregation? Discussing the socialist policy regarding Roma can answer this question.
No Race to the Swift. Negotiating Racial Identity in Past and Present Eastern Europe
Portrayals of Eastern European countries as “bridges” between East and West are commonplace both in the media and in the political discourse. While the question of the historical origin of Europe’s East-West divide is still under heavy dispute among social scientists, it can be argued that it was the Orientalist discourse of the 19th century that decisively shaped the content of the present categories of Western and Eastern Europe and made policies of demarcation from “the Orient” an important strategy of geopolitical and cultural identification with Europe. The enduring quality of Orientalism’s effects on both national self-definitions and social and cultural policy in Eastern Europe is examined in the present paper in two successive steps: first, by looking at the intellectual discourse in 19th century Romania against the background of the country’s political independence from the Ottoman Empire and increasing economic, cultural and political orientation toward Western Europe; second, by discussing the resurgence of systems of representation based on this type of discourse in the context of the European Union’s “Eastern enlargement”. In the first case, the terms of the Western European discourse were appropriated such as to make the “Oriental barbarism” in which Romanian society had been “steeped” until acquiring independence from the Ottoman Empire the point of departure for the development of a European (civilized, Christian, modern) identity. In the second case, the degree of connection to the Ottoman, and therefore Islamic legacy of Eastern European candidates to the European Union has been reinstrumentalized as a legitimating strategy for discursive practices of inferiorization, exoticization, and racial othering that parallel the region's economic peripheralization.