Conference program

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Exploring Racial Capitalism: Critical Romani Studies in Central and Eastern Europe 19-21, October 2023 – Online conference
Thursday 19 October, 2023	Day 1
12:00-12:10 Budapest Time	Introductory remarks by Enikő Vincze (Babeș-Bolyai University) and invitation to collaborate with the journal Critical Romani Studies by Angéla Kóczé (CEU)
12:10-14:00 Budapest Time	Keynote address Angéla Kóczé (CEU) – Unveiling Blindspot: Integrative thinking about foundational and systemic racialization in connection with gender and class-based domination Béla Greskovits (CEU) – Towards Post-Polanyian Logics of Racial Capitalisms on Europe’s Eastern Periphery
14:00-16:00 Budapest Time	Panel 1: Antiracist politics in Romani Studies and activism Moderator: Rufat Demirov (Central European University) Cayetano Fernández (Center for Social Studies at the University of Coimbra, Portugal) – Roma Decolonial praxis and intellectual sovereignty: Challenging racial boundaries in white academia Ismael Cortés (Independent Researcher. Former MP in the Spanish Congress of Deputies) – Combatting Antigypsyism from Theory to Praxis. The case of the Spanish Expert Committee  Carmen Gheorghe (E-Romnja. Association for Promoting Roma Women’s Rights) – Which voices and for whom are addressed antiracist policies? A case of marginality in Romania Andrew Ryder (Institute of Political and International Studies, Eötvös Loránd University Budapest), Marius Taba (Independent Researcher), Nidhi Trehan (CEU & Institute of Social Sciences in New Delhi) – The Roma Movement at a Crossroads: Community Resilience and Learning from the Mistakes of the Past
16:00-18:00 Budapest Time	Panel 2: Deindustrialization, inequalities, and the racialization of the Roma Moderator: József Böröcz (Rutgers University) Barbora Cernusakova (Goldsmiths University of London) – Industrial decline, Roma under-employment and unpayable debts: Producing the “surplus populations” under Czech racial capitalism Sorin Gog (Babeș-Bolyai University) – De-industrialization and the capitalist production of precarious populations in Romania Ashli Mullen (University of Glasgow/ Romano Lav) – Bringing the margins into the middle: racial capitalism and the state-sponsored super-exploitation of Roma migrant workers Jelena Savic (Center for Gender Research at Uppsala University, Sweden) – From Militants to Dreaming Mustangs: The Merchants of the European Romany Banana Republic
Friday 20 October, 2023	Day 2
12:10-14:00 Budapest Time	Keynote address Don Kalb (University of Bergen) – Capitalism is not just an economy; and racial capitalism is a tautology: On the dialectics of value in capitalism, and on ‘double devaluation’ in particular. Aleksandra Lewicki (University of Sussex) – East-West Inequalities and the Ambiguous Racialisation of ‘Eastern Europeans’
14:00-16:00 Budapest Time	Panel 3: Racialized unevenness and housing deprivations Moderator: Ioana Florea (Babeș-Bolyai University) Simona Barbu (Policy Officer with FEANTSA) – Mobility and Racialisation as Drivers of Homelessness – experiences among Roma across Europe Tünde Virág (Centre for Economic and Regional Studies, Budapest) – Governing Roma marginality through development programmes Jonathan McCombs (University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire) – Whiteness as (Post)Socialist Property: Racial Governmentality and Property Transformation in Post-War Hungary (1950-2002) Enikő Vincze (Babeș-Bolyai University), Manuel Mireanu (Babeș-Bolyai University) and George Iulian Zamfir (Babeș-Bolyai University) – The spatial displacements of Roma housing – junctures of racializing administrative processes in the changing political economy context of Baia Mare, Romania
16:00-18:00 Budapest Time	Panel 4: The exploitation of racialized labor Moderator: Irina Culic (Babeș-Bolyai University) Nikola Venkov (Bulgarian Academy of Sciences) – Hybridity of labour: Ethnography of multiple adaptation strategies in a large urban racialised neighbourhood in Bulgaria Neda Deneva (Babes-Bolyai University) and Raluca Perneș (Babes-Bolyai University) – Industrial labour, ethnicity and class in Romania: the case of Roma workers in the reindustrialized landscapes of Baia Mare Pulay Gergő (Centre for Social Sciences, Budapest) – Personalized value struggles amid marketization on the margins of Bucharest Jan Grill (Universidad del Valle, Colombia) – Exploitation, mobilities and relational knowledge. Slovak Romani networks between Slovakia and Great Britain
Saturday 21 October, 2023	Day 3
10:00-12:00 Budapest Time	Panel 5: Ethnicized migration patterns Moderator: Prem Kumar Rajaram (Central European University) Maria Dumitru (MF Norwegian School of Theology, Religion and Society in Oslo) – Multiple Discrimination and Untold Stories of Resistance: a case study of Romanian Roma women conducting informal street work in Oslo Rafael Buhigas Jiménez (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain) – Identifying and controlling the Roma in the seaport. The Case of Roma Immigration from Central and Eastern Europe to Argentina (1911-1947) Gabriel Troc (Babes-Bolyai University), Dana Solonean (Babes-Bolyai University) and Hestia Delibaș (Centro de Estudos Sociais, University of Coimbra) – Contexts and consequences of Roma and non-Roma labor migration from Maramureș county Corina Tulbure – (GRECS, University of Barcelona) – The state’s surveillance of migrants’ autonomy: contradictions during mediation with Roma migrants disclosing forms of racism and emotional control
12:00-14:00 Budapest Time	Roundtable discussion: Roma and non-Roma alliances for the critical exploration of racial capitalism from an East European perspective  Prem Kumar Rajaram (CEU), Anna Mirga-Kruszelnicka (European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture), József Böröcz (Rutgers University) and Ismael Cortés (Independent Researcher. Former MP in the Spanish Congress of Deputies) Moderators: Angéla Kócze (CEU) and Enikő Vincze (Babes-Bolyai University)

DAY 1 – Thursday, 19 October, 2023 

12:00 – 12:10 Budapest Time

Welcome and introductory remarks by Enikő Vincze (Babeș-Bolyai University) and invitation to collaborate with the journal Critical Romani Studies by Angéla Kóczé (CEU)

12:10 – 14:00 Budapest Time- Keynote Address

Angéla Kóczé (CEU) – Unveiling Blindspot: Integrative thinking about foundational and systemic racialization in connection with gender and class-based domination

Abstract: Why does systemic racialization is left out from the narrative of Eastern European sociology and political economy? How does Critical Romani Studies challenge this blind spot in a productive manner, namely creating a more integrative thinking about foundational and systemic racialization in connection with gender and class-based domination. Most of the East European scholarships have been unable to articulate the centrality of gendered and classed racialization in the production of structural violence in neoliberal capitalism.  The default scholarly approach has been to avoid or neglect to problematize racialization thus scholarships have often reinforced ‘colour blind’ or universalist ideologies which mask the enduring structural racism and violence against Roma. In many studies, racism is interpreted very narrowly as an individual moral wrongdoing – as opposed to being structural in nature – that is generally committed by racist, extreme right-wing people. Building upon the seminal work of Black scholars, such as Oliver Cox, Cedric J. Robinson, and others who have critiqued Marxism for failing to account for the racial character of capitalism (Kelley 2017). Based on the rich empirical data and the theory of racial capitalism, I suggest that post-socialist European neoliberal capitalism gradually unfolded in Europe after 1989, have imposed a systemic condition of crisis and structural violence in which racialization and dehumanization of Roma constituted to be normal.

Béla Greskovits (CEU) – Towards Post-Polanyian Logics of Racial Capitalisms on Europe’s Eastern Periphery

Starting with the observation that the mainstream comparative capitalism literature – from the “worlds of welfare capitalism” (1990) and the “varieties of capitalism” (2001) to the “growth models” (2023) – lacks genuine interest in the racial dimension of market society, the presentation asks two big questions. How could a more systematic integration of this dimension enrich the study of peripheral capitalisms? Conversely, how could the study of peripheral capitalist models contribute to a better understanding of race and racism. Tentative answers will be sought following Nancy Fraser (2014) and enlarge Karl Polanyi’s (1957[1944]) arena and agency of marketizing movements and social protectionist countermovements with a third set of agents and social purposes: emancipatory movements, which combat racial(ized) or ethnic (and gender-based) domination. Viewing the multilevel capitalisms on Europe’s periphery through Fraser’s triple movement lens, it is argued, points to new research directions. One is to problematize the role of scholars and activists belonging to racial(ized) minorities in the study and improvement of their own fate in capitalism: can they contribute in ways in which others cannot, and if so, which are these ways? Further, no less complex, issues to explore include: the possible conflicts, compromises, and alliances among the forces of the three movement sectors; the complexity and difficulty of coordination of increasingly overloaded and often contradictory political and policy agendas; the related diversity of labor market and welfare arrangements from a racial emancipatory perspective; and the interplay between grass-roots, national, and EU-level arenas and agendas of the triple movement.

14:00 – 16:00 Budapest Time – Panel 1: Antiracist politics in Romani Studies and activism

Moderator: Rufat Demirov (Central European University)

Cayetano Fernández (Center for Social Studies at the University of Coimbra, Portugal) – Roma Decolonial praxis and intellectual sovereignty: Challenging racial boundaries in white academia

Abstract: Beyond epistemic and theoretical scope, the Decolonial approach as a praxis is rooted and driven by a transformative and emancipatory political dimension oriented to transform oppressive structures and contribute to the liberation of marginalized peoples. Though critical frameworks challenging institutional racism are gaining traction in European Academia, their adoption is often superficial. These frameworks may be used to attract funding or appease critics without substantially challenging institutional racism or disrupting white dominance. This can diminish the central role of race and racialization as analytical categories. The incorporation of decolonial terminology risks becoming merely cosmetic, adjusting to white research agendas without transforming research methods, institutional racism, or race-based power dynamics within contemporary European Academia. The field of Romani Studies is not an exception to these dynamics, anti-Roma racism as a phenomenon and analytical category has passed from a highly tolerated denial to be in the center of academic analysis in Romani Studies in a relatively short period of time. However, and beside the undeniable transformation of the knowledge produced in the field, largely thanks to Roma scholars interrogating their dehumanization and exposing the colonial logics embedded in these fields, few tangible changes regarding to diversify staff, curricula, or knowledge validation systems have followed.  Thus, the presentation brings a critical perspective on the relationship between Academia and anti-racist struggle, focusing on the experience of anti-racist autonomous Roma struggle. Addressing the field of the so-called Romani Studies as rooted in colonial logics that perpetuate the dehumanization of Roma, exposing its complicity with white supremacy, critiquing the ideology of integration and its civilizing mission and understanding anti-Roma racism as an outgrowth of European colonial modernity. Further, the presentation critiques academic knowledge production as upholding white epistemic privilege through mechanisms like the canon and academic knowledge validation system, as well as emphasizing the need to de-center academic validation, valorizing situated knowledge produced within struggle, and exert external pressure to hold Academia accountable.

Ismael Cortés (Independent Researcher. Former MP in the Spanish Congress of Deputies) – Combatting Antigypsyism from Theory to Praxis. The case of the Spanish Expert Committee 

Abstract: The promotion of truth, justice, reparation and guarantees of non-recurrence is a critical issue world-wide , but it is even more pressuring and present in the Southern Cone of Latin America for countries like Colombia, Chile, and Argentina. Somehow these experiences have been an inspiration for the recent Spanish law on Democratic Memory in which I have been involved . In this context, my talk  aims to explain how minority peoples’ testimonies and discourses are crucial to give an account of ongoing processes of memorialisation and clarification of the truth about political violence, and the plural experiences of resistance. Thus, I assume that Truth Commissions beyond the necessary reparation of direct victims can also transform structural situations of human rights violations. This strategy produces a potential frame of recognition that can place minority peoples and cultures in positions of agency. Therefore, I take the notions of ‘memorialisation’ and ‘recognition’ as key pivotal concepts that take questions of historical justice within claims of citizenship and political belonging in democratic systems of governance.

Carmen Gheorghe (E-Romnja. Association for Promoting Roma Women’s Rights) – Which voices and for whom are addressed antiracist policies? A case of marginality in Romania

Abstract: The presentation will explore the activism of roma women, positions and power dynamics, practices including anti-racism strategies. I argue that racism has become more subtle and unconscious, covered by the interest of producing knowledge or by the aim to change individuals in society whereas the structural racism continues to reproduce inequalities. How do we contribute to the formation of antiracism policies is one of the challenges to be addressed.

Andrew Ryder (Institute of Political and International Studies, Eötvös Loránd University Budapest), Marius Taba (Independent Researcher), Nidhi Trehan (CEU &Institute of Social Sciences in New Delhi) – The Roma Movement at a Crossroads: Community Resilience and Learning from the Mistakes of the Past

Abstract: The paper provides a review of the development of Roma civil society or what might be termed the ‘Romani movement’ in light of recent developments in Europe. It then contextualizes the concurrent – though often divergent – visions of Nicolae Gheorghe and George Soros, two deeply influential figures in the evolution of Roma civil society over several decades.  The accumulated work of Soros’ foundations and initiatives, often focusing on advocacy, high level diplomacy and the formation of a Roma vanguard, has at times been criticized for shaping an elitist project, nevertheless some of his initiatives were catalysts for empowerment, and have made valuable contributions to Roma inclusion. Gheorghe, in his wide-ranging career, is perhaps most noted for his vision of Roma grassroots community organizing that has inspired many activists. These competing visions continue to influence and shape the Roma movement and thus reflection and a re-evaluation of these approaches is timely in order to contribute to the formation of a Roma Foundation as proposed by Open Society Foundations.

ELTE Working Paper – The Roma Movement at a Crossroads 2 -10.pdf

16:00 – 18:00 Budapest Time Panel 2: Deindustrialization, inequalities and the racialization of the Roma

Moderator: József Böröcz (Rutgers University)

Barbora Cernusakova (Goldsmiths University of London) – Industrial decline, Roma under-employment and unpayable debts: Producing the “surplus populations” under Czech racial capitalism

Abstract: My intervention shows how the Czech state reproduces Roma marginality and precarity to keep the wages low, to mute the class struggle, and to surveil and discipline the working class as a whole. Through ethnography and socio-legal research, I expose the fallacies of the generalised trope of Roma unemployment and stigmatising culture of poverty. Instead, I propose that the Czech labour and housing market policies, as well as the under-regulated credit industry, are instrumental for racialised containment of Roma in low-paid and precarious jobs. Examining the effects of the temporary contraction of employment in the first decade of the transition to capitalism, I will first show how the state’s strategy to attract international investors relied on reproduction of cheap and disciplined labour. This was achieved by a combination of disciplining policies and practices, which split labour along racial lines—preventing effective workers’ organising—and simultaneously pushed a segment of working class into unpayable debts. In this organised entrapment, the post-socialist neoliberal state operated not only as a regulator but as a predatory creditor himself. In the second part of the presentation, I focus on predatory debt enforcement as a disciplining mechanism over racialised labour. Drawing on the experiences of the research participants, I unpack how the lack transparency obscures the fact that debtors are forced to repay amounts multiple times exceeding those they borrowed. Its consequence is a form of collective economic dispossession of racialised Roma workers.

This presentation will include a short animation entitled Debt Machine: https://vimeo.com/842892762/c58992aec3

Sorin Gog (Babeș-Bolyai University) – De-industrialization and the capitalist production of precarious populations in Romania

Abstract: My paper analyzes the patterns of insertion of Roma populations into the socialist industries from northern Romania and focuses on the impact capitalist de-industrialization had on the formation of racialized ghettos. The research on which this paper is based draws on an extensive ethnography of an industrial centre which had as a main activity the production of non-ferrous metals – gold, led, copper, zinc, etc. I try to show that there is an asymmetric way in which Roma workers were integrated into socialist industries compared to Romanian and Hungarian workers, but most of all that Roma women underwent a path of de-professionalization during socialism. This had important consequences for how de-industrialization impacted Roma families during the early 90’s when neo-liberal reforms led to the collapse of these industries. My main argument is that in order to understand the dynamics of expulsion of Roma from industrial production and the constitution of surplus populations which are instrumental for the functioning of new capitalist industries, we need to look at the reconfiguration of regional value chains of production. It is this reconfiguration that can explain why Roma cheap labor from ghettos and peripheries is so important for the functioning of some of the new capitalist industries. Wages in these new industries do not generate social mobility, but reproduce ghetto conditions. More than this, the vast populations from ghettos are used as surplus-population to keep wages down of other workers which enables the reproduction of poverty in other social strata as well. This is why we need to shift in terms of political activism from a critical theory centred on marginality and exclusion, to one that takes into account the inclusion and exploitation of cheap and racialised labour. This requires us to think of Roma ghettos as spaces that are not outside capitalism, but part of the way capitalism functions in semi-peripheric economies. 

Ashli Mullen (University of Glasgow/Romano Lav) – Bringing the margins into the middle: racial capitalism and the state-sponsored super-exploitation of Roma
migrant workers

Abstract: Capitalism has relied on the exploitation of antagonisms since its inception (Robinson, 1983; Virdee, 2019), which intensifies in moments of crisis. The 2008 crisis defied recovery and has now raged on for well over a decade whilst accumulating others along the way. Its related crisis of politics exists in a vacuum populated by the performative politics of state racism, wherein an amplified disaggregation of the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ is enacted in the name of austerity and immigration control. This alters forms of exploitation as capital adapts in line with new opportunities for appropriation. Based on over six years of fieldwork with Roma migrants from Central and Eastern Europe in Glasgow, I examine previously undocumented forms of labour exploitation and elucidate the ‘tricks of capital’ that these workers are subject to. From the new value generated by these workers each day, employers appropriate not only all value in excess of that required for the reproduction of their labour-power, but transform a necessary cost into further surplus value, by outsourcing that cost to the state (via a policy
ostensibly designed to prevent migrants from ‘burdening’ it). Through the mystifying work that it is put to, the wage slip appears to acquire value in itself that exploitative employers leverage in lieu of full or ‘fair’ payment. Imbued with illusory value, the wage slip acquires symbolic power as a talisman that signifies a
network of documented relations. Exploitation is overdetermined by racialisation, enabling forms of hyper-extraction that exceed the
parameters delineated by the Marxist paradigm. By elucidating how this operates, this case illuminates the reciprocal yet contradictory nature of state-capital relations today, in which the state creates the conditions for labour exploitation to operate. I thus argue that welfare chauvinism functions as a technology of racial
capitalism. In doing so, I insist that whilst Marxist theory remains indispensable for understanding how labour exploitation operates, it must be ‘stretched’ to comprehend how contemporary tricks of capital are overdetermined by racialisation, which furnishes exploitative relations with their efficacy and endurance.

Jelena Savic (Center for Gender Research at Uppsala University, Sweden) – From Militants to Dreaming Mustangs: The Merchants of the European Romany Banana Republic

Abstract: After more than six decades since the inception of Roma activism in Europe, the Roma movement has undergone significant transformations in response to global political and socio-economic shifts. The founders of the Roma movement like Nicolae Gheorghe considering the alignment of their demands for social justice with global politics raised a pivotal question “Bă, de ce ești tu țigan?”, in free translation from Romanian “What does it mean to be Roma?” After these six decades, we can speak about the European Roma elite living under European Gadjo supremacy, nevertheless empowered enough to make some decisions with Gadje about Roma-related recognition and redistribution politics in here proposed symbolic European Romany Republic. This work examines the mainstreaming of Roma politics under duress, amidst rising conservativism, weakening of the public sector and civil society, predatory racial capitalism, and the impact these politics have on poor Roma women, the “class of the lowest of the low”. The paper argues that contrary to the proclaimed emancipatorystance, Roma politics are co-designed more as a survival mercantile strategy of the Roma elite. Embracing dominant social, political, and market models, using primarily respectability politics, the Roma elite widens the class divide. This facilitates the exploitation of the worst-off Roma, affecting especially poor Roma women who are made the outsiders within and whose bodies and labor become an unquestioned resource for co-created Roma models of justice, in fact compatible with Gadjo supremacy and racial capitalism. They are sacrificed as an externality of the proclaimed emancipation of many, ensuring in fact not just survival, but the clientelist and opportunist advancement of the few, likening the European Romany Republic to a post-colonial banana republic, striving to become the Romany Kingdom. As the Roma elite captures the value system, the pretense of the “end of Roma history” calls for “ostranenie” of Roma politics today, and the urgent revisiting of the old question the mainstreaming Roma elite stopped asking “What does it mean to be Roma?”.

DAY 2 – Friday, 20 October, 2023 

12:10 – 14:00 Budapest Time Keynote Address

Don Kalb (University of Bergen) – Capitalism is not just an economy; and racial capitalism is a tautology: On the dialectics of value in capitalism, and on ‘double devaluation’ in particular.

Abstract: Liberal economists and anthropologists easily agree: Value is what labor under ‘modern’ and ‘rational’ conditions of exploitation generates for capital and for society at large; and ethnic identity and tradition is what marks those populations who stand (historically or in the here and now) outside of that modern labor relationship. They are the ‘outside to capital’, enmeshed in gift or household or folk economies embodying distinct cultural values. Marginal populations are then seen as unproductive but ‘cultured’. Good for a politics of liberal human rights and perhaps an economics of tourism, music and art, but outside the value generating modern core of ‘working’ society. The same discursive figure makes them once in a while also good to think with for racists, nationalists and other supremacists, and they then become sacrificed and victimized. This keynote will focus on the dialectics of value in capitalism, and on the traditions of thinking that misrecognize live and labor of ‘marginal populations’ such as the Roma as the outside to capital, from liberalism, to Gibson/Graham and GENS type of feminism and Marxism, and, of course, ethno-nationalism and racism. Capitalism is not just an economy, but a highly dynamic and uneven social system constantly on the move (‘value on the move’) that produces excess and surplus and then absorbs this again. And since it is a type of (class) society, it will involve its variously ‘classed’ subjects, sometimes passionately and always ‘authentically’, in the double devaluation and revaluation processes that continually constitute it.

Aleksandra Lewicki (University of Sussex) – East-West Inequalities and the Ambiguous Racialisation of ‘Eastern Europeans’

Abstract: A growing scholarly literature suggests that people who moved from Europe’s East to its West are racialised. Others argue that the concept racism adds little to our understanding of intra-European mobilities and speak of ‘migratization’ or ‘xenophobia’. Many of these scholarly contributions have in common that they conceive of discrimination as occurring after migration. What is more, they focus on the attitudinal dimension of ‘prejudice’, as expressed in the media or the narratives of East-West movers themselves. What thereby slips from view is that racism has wider geopolitical-economic and legal dimensions, and structures life opportunities. This article explores how categories such as ‘Eastern European’ are deployed, invoked and how they are put to work – via policy or the law. The analysis shows how neoliberal policies – including the precarization of labour, the politics of austerity and the fortification of borders – have attributed a distinctive positionality to ‘Eastern Europeans’ in West European racial hierarchies. On this basis, I suggest that people from Europe’s East are distinctively, yet ambiguously racialised, and discuss various facets of this ambiguity. Most notably, ‘Eastern Europe’ is inferiorized within Europe, but is often positioned within global racialised categories of ‘Europeanness’. This distinctive racialisation, I argue, is not a product of 21st century mobilities but reflects and reproduces the longstanding peripheralization of the region. Of course, racialisation shapes people’s everyday lives after migration; yet, it also channels the life opportunities of those born in the East of the EU over the course of generations.  

14:00 – 16:00 Budapest Time – Panel 3: Racialized unevenness and housing deprivations

Moderator: Ioana Florea (Babeș-Bolyai University)

Simona Barbu (Policy Officer with FEANTSA) – Mobility and Racialisation as Drivers of Homelessness – experiences among Roma across Europe

Abstract: Restrictive interpretations of EU free movement legislation, a lack of appropriate support policies, racialized poverty in the countries of origin, and anti-Roma racism are leading factors in the homelessness of many mobile EU citizens of Roma origin.  Despite a lack of comprehensive data, such situations have often been documented in Western and Northern European countries. In these countries, being exposed to street homelessness or sleeping in emergency shelters and improvised informal living places, Roma become targets for hate speech and crimes; societies and authorities reproduce and adjust manifestations and mechanisms of racism practiced in origin countries.

Intra-EU Roma migration has been on the rise in the past decade, with people escaping severe poverty, corruption, and high levels of racism. EU mobile Roma citizens migrate in search of better opportunities and income-generating activities, which are denied from in their countries due to racism and other structural and social factors. Yet, in Western and Northern Europe, Roma are confronted with multiple challenges, whereas two big factors are: mobility – unclear and restrictive policies as a result of Member States’ inconsistent transposition of the free movement EU legislation; racism – contrary to people’s hopes, anti-Roma racism continues to be a reality in host countries. Thus, Roma mobile EU citizens often experience housing exclusion and homelessness. Furthermore, they are also targets of forced expulsions and human rights violations, including racial profiling.

While the EU has set up a framework for Roma inclusion and participation in Europe, across MS concrete actions, anti-racist policies, and support measures are still lacking. In relation to Roma mobile EU citizens (as well as in general for mobile EU citizens), a support system must be developed in host MS, with a basis in equity, reparatory, and anti-racist approaches. Improving living conditions for Roma and preventing homelessness when exercising free movement must be a priority.

Tünde Virág (Centre for Economic and Regional Studies, Budapest) – Governing Roma marginality through development programmes

Abstract: This paper analyses local policy attempts to maintain socio-spatial order in the face of demographic change and economic restructuring. In this case, a former industrial town on the Hungarian periphery, the local government has employed a decades-long strategy of shaping urban space to maintain pre-existing social and class positions, primarily by exercising control over marginalized groups and their local mobility. These local government tactics and practices constitute a form of poverty governance based on disciplining and displacement and the exploitation of existing development programmes. The paper contributes to understanding how poverty governance, as a local public policy remit, functions in peripheral towns that lack any form of investment in the housing stock and where EU-funded programmes are the only available resource for urban development and housing initiatives. More specifically, the question is addressed as to how poverty governance under such circumstances interacts with policies targeted at reducing social and spatial exclusion.

As I will indicate, the local municipality reorganizes urban space through EU-funded urban rehabilitation projects that ostensibly target social integration. Thus, the local government filters more vulnerable groups through their social and spatial mobility; containing and disciplining those, primarily Roma, who are seen as undeserving, and privileging those seen as deserving of support. The latter are provided with material protection and a sense of belonging to local society but are expected to accept the conditions prescribed by local actors.

Jonathan McCombs (University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire) – Whiteness as (Post)Socialist Property: Racial Governmentality and Property Transformation in Post-War Hungary (1950-2002)

Abstract: This presentation investigates how the Hungarian state justified withholding tenure claims to Roma at various moments of transformation to the legal construction of property. Taking insights from US-based critical race theory and settler colonial studies, I deploy the concept of racial governmentality as a way of tracking the various governmental rationalities that inform differing racial projects undertaken by the Hungarian state between 1950-2002. To this end, I highlight four governmental rationalities: liberalism, illiberalism, welfarism, and neoliberalism. I group these into two sub-categories, rationalities of citizenship (liberalism and illiberalism) and rationalities of economic governance (welfarism and neoliberalism). Through a survey of nearly 15,000 pages of archival research, I provide evidence of how rationalities of citizenship and rationalities of economic governance combine to produce unique governing strategies that work through the idiom of property with the aim of dispossessing Roma of spaces they inhabit. The first of these strategies I term ‘illiberal welfarism’ to describe the state-socialist project of direct action to uplift the Roma population through the project officially titled “The Elimination of Settlements with Unacceptable Social Conditions.” This project oversaw the forced removal of Roma off of squatter settlements, and their subsequent dispersal into the population with the aim of eliminating the Roma minority through forced assimilation and proletarianization. The second I term ‘liberal welfarism,’ which assumed hegemony in the early years of the capitalist transition, where district governments in Budapest (particularly the 7th, 8th, and 9th districts) forbade privatization on housing, trapping many Roma in dilapidated housing that they had no formal right to improve. The third I term ‘liberal neoliberalism,’ which emerged out of the failures of ‘liberal welfarism,’ and oversaw the mass eviction of Roma from inner-city Pest districts by augmenting property laws in public housing to evict squatters without due process.

Enikő Vincze (Babeș-Bolyai University), Manuel Mireanu (Babeș-Bolyai University) and George Iulian Zamfir (Babeș-Bolyai University) – The spatial displacements of Roma housing – junctures of racializing administrative processes in the changing political economy context of Baia Mare, Romania

Abstract: At the outset of turning Baia Mare into a regional industrial center, the Romanian authorities began conceiving (1950’s) and implementing (1960’s) an urbanization plan. The Roma people of Baia Mare were seen as a hurdle in systematization. Initially labeling them guilty of ‘construction indiscipline,’ the local authorities gradually saw Roma neighborhoods, such as Hatvan, as hotspots of crime and disorder. As urban systematization was advancing during the 1970s and ‘80s, socialist attempts at proletarianization of the Roma living in Hatvan partially failed. Relocation from house to apartment deprived many Roma of their resources and tools of livelihood, ultimately pushing them into a cycle of evictions, relocations, and containment led by the municipality long into the post-socialist period. Beginning with the 1990s, against the backdrop of capitalist transformations in Romania, the local public authorities played an important role in reshaping Baia Mare’s urban infrastructure. Their public housing policies culminated with the administrative measures taken by the middle of the 2010s, which enclaved the impoverished Roma into peripheral and racialized social housing blocs.

16:00 – 18:00 Budapest Time – Panel 4: The exploitation of racialized labor

Moderator: Irina Culic (Babeș-Bolyai University)

Nikola Venkov (Bulgarian Academy of Sciences) – Hybridity of labour: Ethnography of multiple adaptation strategies in a large urban racialised neighbourhood in Bulgaria

Abstract: Residents of segregated minority urban districts in Bulgaria, who are racialised as „Roma” irrespective of their self-identity, suffer from widespread discrimination on the labour market. Here I look at the largest such district, the neighbourhood of Old Village in Plainstown, and show the varied and imaginative ways through which locals cope with the scarcity of formal employment which has persisted ever since the collapse of state socialism. A widespread strategy is the hybridity of labour: hegding one’s investments in time and resources into several entrepreneural and waged activities simultaneously (cf. Simone 2014), as well as always being on the lookout for further opportunities. Acquiring multiple sets of skills becomes a highly-valued form of capital, in embodied form.

Further, Old Village is not a socially homogeneous neighbourhood, yet, notably, possibly two thirds of its residents could be classified as what I would like to refer to as „middle class” within the context of the racialised minority. I discuss what this means.

Neda Deneva (Babes-Bolyai University) and Raluca Perneș (Babes-Bolyai University) – Industrial labour, ethnicity and class in Romania: the case of Roma workers in the reindustrialized landscapes of Baia Mare

Abstract: Re-industrialization in the North-West of Romania re-configured not only the industrial landscape, but also the integration of an ethicized working class. By drawing on the case of Romanian Roma in Baia Mare and its surroundings, we trace the formation of a flexible labour force and the effects of supply-chain capitalism has on poor local communities, their mobility and their social reproduction. We explore closely the paradox of ultra-poor communities integrated in an apparently stable and regular labour relations within the local industries. The majority of Roma in our research work as industrial workers with regular contracts and access to social benefits but contrary to conventional expectations, this does not result in income stability, access to social benefits or indeed financial security in practice. Instead, workers often resort to seasonal work or temporary transnational migration to make up for the limited income and balance the difficult physical conditions in the factory. Despite the available full-time and regular labour opportunities, members of the local Roma communities suffer from extreme poverty, live in very bad living and housing conditions, have low life expectancy and poor health outcomes. WE argue that to understand these developments fully, we need to shifting the lens to social reproduction and to account for temporality. Thus, we analyse labour trajectories and family biographies. By doing this, we aim to challenge linear global industrial development narratives of industrial work as ‘better work’ and shed light on how social reproduction with its temporalities co-constitutes labour experiences in industrial settings.

Pulay Gergő (Centre for Social Sciences, Budapest) – Personalized value struggles amid marketization on the margins of Bucharest

Abstract: In capitalist moral economies, struggles about categories for valuing human worth are transposed to the domains of personhood and exchange relations. On the urban margins of the southeast European periphery, in the most notorious, mixed Roma and non-Roma Romanian neighbourhood of Bucharest, structurally accumulated problems of governance turn into practical challenges that need to be tackled with the means at each person’s disposal. Under conditions of capitalist incorporation and prolonged crises on the post-socialist periphery, the main protagonists of this account strive for relative independence from actors who may expose them to abuse, the victim of rip-off, fraud or other forms of exploitation. The ethnography introduces male members of an extended network of Spoitori Roma with diverse livelihoods, who bought scrap directly from street-level collectors (in smaller quantities) and sold the material in larger units (tonnes) to firms that dealt with the industrial management and transportation of recyclables around Bucharest during the 2010s. Because of their position as middle-men in a larger commodity chain, traders developed direct contact and co-operation with largely homeless drug-users – who represented the lowest of the low in the local hierarchy of social value, but who happened to be the main suppliers of scrap as valuable ‘merchandise’ (marfa). Capitalist incorporation, as mediated locally by the privatized recycling industry, was perceived by my interlocutors as a large-scale plunder of their country. The paper attests the ways in which marketization elucidates moral and political deliberation among men who hope to be or become ‘their own bosses’ in precarious urban conditions.

Jan Grill (Universidad del Valle, Colombia) – Exploitation, mobilities and relational knowledge. Slovak Romani networks between Slovakia and Great Britain

Abstract: This paper explores issues of racialization, exploitation and relational knowledge across shifting positions and movements of one particular network of Slovak Romani workers oscillating between contexts of un- and underemployment within a larger system of racial capitalism. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Slovakia and in Great Britain, this paper examines processes emerging in the context of post-2004 EU enlargement that shaped a new wave of labor migration patterns from Central Eastern Europe. In the context of shrinking forms of state support accompanied by disciplinary (and racializing) workfare, formal unemployment and indebtness, many turned their aspirations and hopes towards movements away from Slovakia. Drawing on some debates in the growing literature on racial capitalism, the paper discusses how the racialized system delimits and differentiate through a set of coercive mechanisms and hierarchies of worth but also how it propels desires for certain modes of consumption and aesthetics shaped by migration to the Great Britain (and back). The literature on racial capitalism tends to focus more on the macrolevel and theoretical aspects of capitalist development and larger processes, patterns and relations producing exploitation, expropriations, expulsions and dehumanization. This paper focuses more on microlevel in order to examine how does racial capitalism shapes the everyday lives of transnational networks of Slovak Romani workers moving between Slovakia and Great Britain. It does so by reconstructing experiences and relational knowledge of the Romani workers but also situating these within the shifting social positions, occupations and forms of work as they move between different spaces, relations and positions.

DAY 3 – Saturday, 21 October, 2023 

10:00 – 12:00 Budapest Time – Panel 5: Ethnicized migration patterns

Moderator: Prem Kumar Rajaram (Central European University)

Maria Dumitru (MF Norwegian School of Theology, Religion and Society in Oslo) – Multiple Discrimination and Untold Stories of Resistance: a case study of Romanian Roma women conducting informal street work in Oslo

Abstract: This thesis aims to challenge the stereotypical collective image toward Romanian Roma women by offering a study case that examines the experiences of Romani women who live in a state of unintentional homelessness in Oslo, Norway and survive by begging, recycling bottles, or selling magazines. To tackle the hegemonic knowledge, which is predominantly toxified by negative prejudices toward Roma, the special narratives of Roma women refute these images and seek to disclose untold stories of resistance. As this is the first case study made on this topic by a Roma woman, I aim to create a space for the silenced voices of Romanian Roma women whose narratives and struggles remain unheard. In order to conduct a thorough investigation of the intersectional discrimination suffered by Roma women and the outcome of their oppression, I will use the framework of intersectionality and explore the concepts of resistance developed by Roma women. Thus, by taking the cases of Romani women who are left in extreme poverty in Romania and, therefore, “forced” to migrate as a strategy of survival to provide for them and their families, I will analyze both the intersectional experiences of Roma women and the forms of resistance they have developed as a way in resisting oppression.Hence, this study also aims to challenge the previous research made on Roma migration to Norway and Western countries by tackling the missing female experiences of Romani women in light of their multifaceted forms of discrimination that stem from being women, Roma, poor, migrants, and homeless.

Rafael Buhigas Jiménez (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain) – Identifying and controlling the Roma in the seaport. The Case of Roma Immigration from Central and Eastern Europe to Argentina (1911-1947)

Abstract: Legislation regulating emigration to Argentina in the 19th and first third of the 20th century was tightened to reinforce order and social control in the territory. As a result of the previous situation, the category of “undesirables” became increasingly operational. That is, those who were not to get off the boat and live in the country. The Roma population was one of the most affected, as they were banned from entering the country at different times. This contribution will provide some insight into the state of the issue by reflecting on the relevance of the primary sources that can be used and by establishing a critical dialogue with the few works published to date. Finally, and as the most important part of this contribution to the panel, the profile of Roma passengers arriving in Buenos Aires (mainly from Central and Eastern Europe) in the first decades of the 20th century will be examined. This will be based on a social analysis that understands migration as a political and cultural conflict.

Gabriel Troc (Babeș-Bolyai University), Dana Solonean (Babeș-Bolyai University) and Hestia Delibaș (Centro de Estudos Sociais, University of Coimbra) – Contexts and consequences of Roma and non-Roma labor migration from Maramureș county

Abstract: As part of the project Precarious Labor and Peripheral Housing we investigated what role transnational migration played in restructuring Baia Mare during deindustrialization-reindustrialization sequence. Looking to the different spatial and occupational mobility of the Roma and non-Roma laborers over time Gabriel Troc reveals that Roma less successful migration can be linked to their more complete proletarianization during socialism. Dana Solonean provides evidence and explanations for the growing phenomenon of transnational labor migration following de-industrialization as well as of the changes in country destinations and jobs as result of 2008 economic crisis in Western countries. Hestia Delibaș brings ethnographical proofs that the 1990’s economic slowdown had a much greater impact on Roma which later influenced their labor migration paths. She focused her analyses on the social constraints that arrest Roma in a cycle of debt and dependency on informal and exploitative labor markets, both at home and abroad.

Corina Tulbure (GRECS, University of Barcelona) – The state’s surveillance of migrants’ autonomy: contradictions during mediation with Roma migrants disclosing forms of racism and emotional control

Abstract: In recent decades, there has been an increase in the practice of mediation in different fields such as social work, education and health, and the figure of the mediator has been created both within public and private institutions dedicated to migrant inclusion programmes. Based on interviews with mediators interacting with young Roma migrants with neither a residence permit in Spain nor access to housing, monitored by state institutions, the article examines the role of the institutional mediation with Roma migrants and pays attention to a colonial and hierarchical listening which defines the practice of mediation. The way in which the institutions listen to the migrants during the mediation process is not neutral but reveals racial patterns.

The mediator finds him/herself in a contradictory position between the migrants and the institutions. They can be seen as occupying two ends of the power spectrum. During interventions, they negotiate the institutional understanding of vulnerability that gives step to practices of care and control (Malkki, 1992) and a forward spatial segregation of Roma migrants in Barcelona. Our paper examines how the state infiltrates and dominate the lives of Roma migrants included in institutional supervision programs through the practice of mediation, exposing forms of racism and emotional control. Within this context, mediation becomes an instrument and practice that contributes to the creation of the “migrant” as an inferiorized racial other.

12:00 – 14:00 Budapest Time – Roundtable discussion: Roma and non-Roma alliances for the critical exploration of racial capitalism from an East European perspective

Prem Kumar Rajaram (CEU), Anna Mirga-Kruszelnicka (European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture) and József Böröcz (Rutgers University)

Moderators: Angéla Kócze (CEU) and Enikő Vincze (Babes-Bolyai University)

The PRECWORK project team from Babeș-Bolyai University, in collaboration with academics of the Romani Studies Program at Central European University, invited distinguished scholars to debate the potential of addressing racial capitalism in Eastern Europe at the crossroads of Romani Studies and political economy analysis of capitalism. Prem Kumar Rajaram (CEU), Anna Mirga-Kruszelnicka (European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture) and József Böröcz (Rutgers University) will discuss the relationship between capitalism and racism, class exploitation and racial oppression (possibly also sexism and patriarchal domination) not only with the analytical aim to reveal a specific contribution to the critical international investigation of racial capitalism but also with the political and epistemological endeavor to (re)build an alliance between Roma and non-Roma scholars exactly around this matter. The roundtable discussion will be moderated by Angéla Kócze (CEU) and Enikő Vincze (BBU).