Racialized Bordering Discourses on European Roma

Using detailed examples from Finland, Hungary, Canada and the UK, this book explores relationships between the racialization and discrimination experienced by heterogeneous European Roma populations, and the processes of everyday bordering embedded in state policies and media discourses. In the context of the long histories of discrimination experienced by Roma people across Europe, the chapters engage with changing EU policies, including the recent tensions between inter-European de-bordering and the selective immigration policies introduced as different states react to EU free movement. Employing an intersectional analysis, the authors capture the perspectives of differentially situated people and associated discourses to examine the continuing racism experienced by European Roma citizens in their interaction with bordering technologies. They examine the homogenizing 'racial othering' and construction of Roma as a 'criminal category' that co-exists with the differentiations made between 'indigenous' and 'migrant' Roma central to dominant bordering discourses and the contestations of different Roma populations. Chapters focus on Roma activism and the media, the exclusion of Roma residents via urban regeneration and welfare provision, and powerful media and political discourses about Roma populations in different national and transnational contexts. This book was originally published as a special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies.

Nira Yuval-Davis is a Professor and Director of the Centre for Research on Migration, Refugees and Belonging at the University of East London, UK. Georgie Wemyss is Senior Lecturer in Sociology and Co-Director of the Centre for Research on Migration, Refugees and Belonging at the University of East London, UK. Kathryn Cassidy is Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at Northumbria University, UK.

Introduction: racialized bordering discourses on European Roma 1. Follow the money: international donors, external homelands and their effect on Romani media and advocacy 2. Roma communities, urban development and social bordering in the inner city of Budapest 3. Media mirrors? Framing Hungarian Romani migration to Canada in Hungarian and Canadian press 4. Coping with everyday bordering: Roma migrants and gatekeepers in Helsinki 5. "People think that Romanians and Roma are the same": everyday bordering and the lifting of transitional controls 6. Press discourses on Roma in the UK, Finland and Hungary