“Exploring Racial Capitalism: Critical Romani Studies in Central and Eastern Europe” is the closing conference of the research project ‘Precarious labor and peripheral housing. The socio-economic practices of Romanian Roma in the context of changing industrial relations and uneven territorial development’ conducted at Babeș-Bolyai University of Cluj-Napoca, Romania, between 2020-2023. Embracing PRECWORK’s approach, the conference opens up a dialogue about the condition of impoverished Roma in the field of housing, labor and migration, viewed in the wider political economy context that affected them through deindustrialization, uneven development and racialization processes.

Presentation

This is the closing conference of the research project ‘Precarious labor and peripheral housing. The socio-economic practices of Romanian Roma in the context of changing industrial relations and uneven territorial development’ conducted at Babeș-Bolyai University of Cluj-Napoca, Romania, between 2020-2023 . Embracing PRECWORK’s approach, the conference opens up a dialogue about the condition of impoverished Roma in the field of housing, labor and migration, viewed in the wider political economy context that affected them through deindustrialization, uneven development and racialization processes. The project team from Babes-Bolyai University, in collaboration  with academics of the Romani Studies Program at Central European University, invites distinguished scholars to present their findings on these themes and foster alliances between  Roma and non-Roma researchers  to understand racial capitalism from an East European perspective. We are convinced that Critical Romani Studies could and should have a contribution to the international investigation of racial capitalism.

As an emerging academic inquiry, Critical Romani Studies challenges the negligence of Roma in mainstream political economy in which they  have been invisibilized and sidelined. Several scholars observe  that European scholarship faces a significant obstacle, what Lentin (2008)* aptly describes as Europe’s post Shoah silence on race. The silence and abandonment of Roma racialization led to the failure to acknowledge and address contemporary forms of structural racism that have manifested in various forms.  Critical Romani Studies  seeks an academic  intervention  to expose the logic of capitalist accumulation and the global  hierarchical division of labor reproduced in the political economy of  Eastern Europe, in which  the (unproductive) “surplus” population become differentiated  both socially (racialized) and spatialyl (segregated). The conference will bring together scholars to create new alliances  to critically reflect and explore the modalities in which  racial capitalism functions in Eastern Europe.        

* Lentin, Alana. “Europe and the Silence about Race.” European Journal of Social Theory 11, no. 4 (2008): 487–503. https://doi.org/10.1177/1368431008097008.

Critical Romani Studies is an international, interdisciplinary, double blind peer-reviewed journal providing a forum for activist-scholars to critically examine racial oppressions, different forms of exclusion, inequalities, and human rights abuses of Roma. Without compromising academic standards of evidence collection and analysis, the Journal seeks to create a platform to critically engage with academic knowledge production, and generate critical academic and policy knowledge targeting—amongst others—scholars, activists, and policymakers. Scholarly expertise is a tool, rather than the end, for critical analysis of social phenomena affecting Roma, contributing to the fight for social justice. The Journal especially welcomes the cross-fertilization of Romani studies with the fields of critical race studies, gender and sexuality studies, critical policy studies, diaspora studies, colonial studies, postcolonial studies, and studies of decolonization.

The Romani Studies Program is an independent academic unit of Central European University since 2017. The Romani Studies Program (RSP) aims to engage scholars, policy makers, and activists in interdisciplinary knowledge production and debate on Roma identity and movement; antigypsyism; social justice and policy making; gender politics; and structural inequality. RSP encompasses the Roma Graduate Preparation Program and the Advanced Certificate in Romani Studies. RSP offers courses for MA and PhD students of CEU and summer courses for graduate students and activists scholars from all over the world. RSP organizes annual academic conferences promoting critical approaches to Romani Studies and publishes Critical Romani Studies an international, interdisciplinary, double blind peer-reviewed open access journal. RSP supports internships and offers various fellowship primarily targeting Romani students and scholars.

The research project ‘Precarious labor and peripheral housing. The socio-economic practices of Romanian Roma in the context of changing industrial relations and uneven territorial development’ provides a comprehensive understanding of the living and working conditions of Romanian Roma faced by changing industrial relations and uneven development. We address responses to social marginalization, which is subjecting people both materially and symbolically at the intersection of precarious labor, peripheral housing and migration. Our case study is located in Baia Mare, the administrative and industrial center of Maramureş region. Based on this analysis, we are looking for the establishment of new connections, partnerships and solidarities between local actors at multiple levels dedicated to the empowerment of dispossessed Roma. This project is financed by the Research Program associated with Norway Grants 2014-2021 and administrated by UEFISCDI. The project is hosted by Babeș-Bolyai University and is implemented by a multidisciplinary and trans-national team. Contract 22 from 01/11/2020 (RO-NO-2019-0496).

Programme

DAY 1 - Thursday, 19 October, 2023

12:00 - 12:10 Welcome and introductory remarks by Enikő Vincze (Babeș-Bolyai University) and invitation to collaborate with the journal Critical Romani Studies by Márton Rövid (CEU)

12:10 - 14:00   Keynote Address Angéla Kócze (CEU) and Béla Greskovits (CEU)

14:00 - 16:00 - Panel 1: Antiracist politics in Romani Studies and activism

• 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 Cortes (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)  - TBA
• Andrew Ryder (Institute of Political and International Studies, Eötvös Loránd University Budapest), Marius Taba (Corvinus University Budapest), 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 - Panel 2: Deindustrialization, inequalities and the racialization of the Roma

• Gábor Scheiring (Georgetown University Qatar) - Deindustrialization, the Roma, and the Postsocialist Mortality Crisis
• Barbora Cernusakova (Goldsmiths University of London) - Industrial decline, Roma under-employment and unpayable debts: Producing the “surplus populations” under Czech racial capitalism
• Jelena Savic - TBA
• Sorin Gog (Babeș-Bolyai University) - De-industrialization and the capitalist production of precarious populations in Romania

DAY 2 - Friday, 20 October, 2023

12:10 - 14:00   Keynote Address Don Kalb (University of Bergen) and Aleksandra Lewicki (University of Sussex)

14:00 - 16:00 - Panel 3: Racialized unevenness and housing deprivations

• Simona Barbu (Policy Officer with FEANTSA) - Mobility and Racialisation as Drivers of Homelessness - experiences among Roma across Europe
• Virág Tünde (Hungarian Academy of Science) - Governing Roma marginality through development programmes
• Jonathan McComb (University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire) - Whiteness as (Post)Socialist Property: Racial Governmentality and Property Transformation in Post-War Hungary
• Enikő Vincze (Babeș-Bolyai University), Manuel Mireanu (Babeș-Bolyai University) and George Iulian Zamfir (Babeș-Bolyai University): The spatial relocations of Roma housing in Baia Mare - administrative histories in a changing political economy context 

16:00 - 18:00 - Panel 4: The exploitation of racialized labor

• 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) - TBA

DAY 3 - Saturday, 21 October, 2023

10:00 - 12:00 - Panel 5: Ethnicized migration patterns

• Ana Ivasiuc (Maynooth University) - Security and Racial Capitalism: Securitizations of Roma across Borders
• 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 Delibas (Babes-Bolyai University) - Contexts and consequences of Roma and non-Roma labor migration from Maramureș county

12:00 - 14:00 - 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), Margareta Matache (Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health) and József Böröcz (Rutgers University)

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

Organizing committee

Angéla Kócze (Central European University), Márton Rövid (Central European University), Enikő Vincze (Babeș-Bolyai University), Sorin Gog (Babeș-Bolyai University), Macrina Moldovan (Babeș-Bolyai University), Esther Holbrook (Central European University), Mădălina Elena Tohănean (Babeș-Bolyai University), Andreea Ramona Popa (Babeș-Bolyai University), Annamaria Major (Babeș-Bolyai University), Daria Maria Oțel (Babeș-Bolyai University)

Conveners

The conference is organized in the frame of the research project ‘Precarious labor and peripheral housing. The socio-economic practices of Romanian Roma in the context of changing industrial relations and uneven territorial development’ conducted at Babeș-Bolyai University of Cluj-Napoca, Romania in collaboration with The Romani Studies Program from CEU and the international journal Critical Romani Studies.

Registration

The conference is taking place online and participation is free of charge, but it requires registration. After registering for the event you will receive details about the conference program and the Zoom links. You can register here: https://forms.office.com/e/MSAgrAiZWd