Researching the health and social inequalities experienced by European Roma populations: complicity, oppression and resistance

This paper draws on the experience of two Romani and three non-Romani scholars in knowledge production on the health and social inequalities experienced by European Roma populations. Together, we explore how we might better account for, and work against, the complex web of dynamic oppressions embedded within processes of academic knowledge production. Our aim is to encourage careful scrutiny through which sociologists of health and illness might better recognise our own complicity with oppression and identify concrete actions towards transforming our research practices. Drawing on a well-known domains of racism typology (Annual Review of Public Health, 40, 2019, 105), we use examples from our own work to illustrate three interconnected domains of oppression in which we have found ourselves entangled (structural, cultural and interpersonal). A new conceptual framework is proposed as an aid to understanding the spectrum of different “types” of complicity (voluntary–involuntary, conscious–unconscious) that one might reproduce across all three domains. We conclude by exploring how sociologists of health and illness might promote a more actively anti-racist research agenda, identifying and challenging subtle, hidden and embedded negative ideologies and practices as well as more obviously oppressive ones. We hope these reflections will help revitalise important conversations

The Roma in Contemporary Europe: Struggling for Identity at a Time of Proliferating Identity Politics

This chapter takes stock of how diverse debates about Roma identity have developed since the fall of communism. The chapter begins with an extensive discussion of three general dimensions of identity that are related to the denial of racially motivated violence against Roma, to radical practices of marginalization and exclusion and to the interconnection of outside identification and self-representation. The chapter’s second half discusses identity issues more specifically in the context of identity politics and critiques thereof. Moreover, it explains how the contributions to the book articulate identity beyond the binary of essentialism versus constructivism that is still dominant in Roma-related scholarship

The Challenge of Recognition, Redistribution and Representation of Roma in Contemporary Europe

This concluding chapter of the book recapitulates the findings of the individual contributions from the perspective of Nancy Fraser’s reflection on the reconceptualization of justice in post-1989 Europe. We follow her observation that, under postsocialist conditions, the increased societal focus on identity politics and recognitive dimensions of minority-related affairs has problematically coincided with a truncated politics of redistribution. However, rather than merely striving for a more equal and just society through balancing the recognitive and redistributive dimensions, in our reflection on the situation of Roma, we follow Fraser’s suggestion that justice should be achieved through a thorough reconsideration of the dimension of representation, understood as the ability to re-problematize disputes about justice

The Roma and Their Struggle for Identity in Contemporary Europe

Thirty years after the collapse of Communism, and at a time of increasing anti-migrant and anti-Roma sentiment, this book analyses how Roma identity is expressed in contemporary Europe. With backgrounds ranging from political theory and postcolonial, cultural and gender studies to art history, feminist critique and anthropology, the contributors reflect on the extent to which a politics of identity regarding historically disadvantaged, racialized minorities such as the Roma can still be legitimately articulated

Decolonizing Canonical Roma Representations: The Cartographer with an Army

By means of a discussion of the work of the Romani artist Damian Le Bas, Huub van Baar shows that, in contemporary Romani art movements, we are able to observe a highly critical attitude towards prominent Roma and Gypsy representations in media, culture and art history in and beyond Europe. The essay argues that Le Bas developed, particularly through his inventive cartography, a novel visual language in which canonical Roma representations are decolonized. In both Damian and Delaine Le Bas’s work, known and unknown elements from present pasts are re-appropriated and reassembled, and strategically and actively positioned within the politics of the present

Governing the Roma, Bordering Europe: Europeanization, Securitization and Differential Inclusion

This chapter revisits the discussion about the Europeanization of Roma representation that Huub van Baar started a decade ago and clarifies how this perspective differs from what others have called the Europeanization of Roma identity or policy. Van Baar argues that the focus on the Europeanization of Roma representation helps to challenge the remnants of Eurocentrism that are still present in discussions of the Europeanization of Roma identity or policy. Van Baar explains how his perspective allows a critical analysis of the position of the Roma at both the nexus of security and citizenship, and of security and development