THE ANTI-ROMA EUROPE RACISM, VIOLENCE AND THE (UN)GOVERNABILITY OF THE ROMA BODY

Supervisor/s: Silvia Rodríguez Maeso and Co-supervisor: JAIME AMPARO ALVES

Doctoral Programme: Human Rights in Contemporary Societies

This research focuses on the politics of structural and everyday Anti-Roma racism and its traumatic effects on the Roma people in Europe. I engage with Philomena Essed's definition of the concept of everyday racism as practices, activities and attitudes accepted in a given system. The notion of the structural racism refers to racialized governmentalities and ideologies/epistemologies that reproduce power relations and dehumanization that are grounded on white privilege/supremacy, thus, the maintenance of whiteness as state sovereignty.

This PhD project aims to analyze the layered interconnectedness of political violence, racialization and the human as ideologies that (re)produce mechanisms for controlling, disciplining and killing Roma bodies. These mechanisms are historically rooted in colonial power relations that has constructed the "Other/non-human" body, the Roma body, as disposable flesh that feeds notions and practices of (un)governability, necessary control and discipline. Thus, I argue that the violence against the Roma can no longer be dislocated from the analysis of the historical violence against the Other body, the non-human body. Drawing on this, this research aims to think through political and institutional notions of Antigypsyism as sets of relational socio-political processes that discipline Roma bodies into humans.