This contribution builds on ethnographic fieldwork focused on the activity of a mobile public healthcare unit dedicated to Roma camps in Rome, Italy. An analysis of the relationship between ...institutional representatives and the Roma population is brought to light through observations of medical consultations. Examining what happens during medical activity reveals both the State dimension of everyday life in a context of extreme precariousness and the ethics of social justice circulating in the camps. The moral feeling that emerges in a reciprocal and constant way in these interactions is mistrust. This article focuses on the uses of this feeling both on the sides of Roma and medical personnel, and on its effects on the issues of health, public healthcare and control in Roma camps in the Italian capital.
While equality in healthcare implementation constitutes one of the precepts of the European Roma inclusion programs, health disparities are still one of the most problematic areas contributing to the ...marginality of residents in ‘Roma camps’. The implementation of the right to health and access to healthcare services and resources represents a major challenge in their everyday experience. If we consider citizenship as a set of natural and legal rights to be protected as a symbolic and material link between a nation-state and a subject either born there or formally belonging to its national community, healthcare emerges as a technology of government where such rights are challenged, limited, or denied. Based on an ethnographic work on the role of public healthcare in ‘Roma camps’, this contribution focuses on contemporary topographies of health in the city of Rome through the lens of Roma marginalization within its urban spaces. How do camps residents experience the city through their relationship with its healthcare resources? And how does the healthcare system become a powerful tool of exclusion? Healthcare access in an urban context is an illustration of the dialectics of political power, knowledge, and expertise as a crucial factor in the administration of marginalized groups. From this perspective, the analysis focuses on precarity in the urban healthcare landscape, and on what living in a ‘Roma camp’ means in terms of healthcare. Both dimensions interrogate citizenship as a set of rightful entitlements that includes access to state-provided medical services.
•Access to healthcare represents a major element of precarity for Roma living in camps.•Public healthcare becomes a tool of exclusion contributing to Roma marginalization.•Topographies of health in Rome have a crucial role in Roma urban marginalization.•The implementation of the right to health translates actual notions of citizenship.•Roma case demonstrates we need to rethink the right to health as a citizenship right.
Disparities in access to healthcare services and, more generally, in the implementation of the right to health constitute a crucial element in the insecurities of urban life. This contribution ...revisits ethnographic research carried out in Roma camps in Rome and proposes the theme of therapeutic informality through the lens of the relationship between Roma and healthcare institutions. The paper focuses on three key themes: informal healthcare, healthcare temporalities, and therapeutic informality. These focal points are developed around three questions; firstly, how do economic and housing informalities of particular groups intertwine with informality in the field of healthcare? Secondly, considering the centrality of the theme of temporalities in studies on health issues, how are temporalities imposed by living in a regime of informality related to the temporalities of healthcare? Thirdly, how does informality in the field of healthcare specifically affect the forms of citizenship of Roma community members? The notions of informal healthcare and therapeutic informality are proposed as analytical tools to grasp what is at stake when economic, housing and urban informalities intersect around healthcare issues.
Contemporary environmental crises, the migration dynamics related to them, current forms of border management, and all the resulting body phenomena are areas that need a gaze capable of grasping ...their intersections and interactions. In recent years, anthropology has extensively inquired into these issues. What we need today is the development of an ethnographic practice capable of capturing the interactions between these domains. In this direction, we outline the contours of an environmental ethnography of the body at the borders. It is a perspective that, moving from a focus on the reconceptualizations offered by recent studies on these issues, is based on the idea that analyzing the environmental crisis and its bodily dimensions from the perspective of borders emerges as an effective revealer of issues that go far beyond what is at stake in the border areas themselves. This article describes this approach through a dual perspective: on the one hand, a state of the art in anthropological and social science studies about these issues; and, on the other, a programmatic reflection for an ongoing research program.
The treatment of Roma groups is one of the most significant social equality issues in contemporary Europe. This article draws on the analysis of the Roma presence in Rome. It combines the ...ethnographic observation of a mobile medical unit operating in the Roma camps and shanties with the analysis of public and political reactions regarding a tragic accident that happened in one of these settlements. On the one hand, the focus of the article is on the medical unit's involvement in the reproduction of the marginalization of Roma citizens, and on the other, it draws on the case of the death of four Roma children, analyzing the political turn to grief of those individuals whose lives are subjected to different calculations of values.
The treatment of Roma groups is one of the most significant social equality issues in contemporary Europe. This article draws on the analysis of the Roma presence in Rome. It combines the ...ethnographic observation of a mobile medical unit operating in the Roma camps and shanties with the analysis of public and political reactions regarding a tragic accident that happened in one of these settlements. On the one hand, the focus of the article is on the medical unit's involvement in the reproduction of the marginalization of Roma citizens, and on the other, it draws on the case of the death of four Roma children, analyzing the political turn to grief of those individuals whose lives are subjected to different calculations of values.
Over the last decade, Roma populations in Europe have been the object of strict securitarian policies. The Rome case is particularly interesting due to the continued shift from securitarian to ...humanitarian discourses and actions led by local institutions. The specific health care system implemented in the legal and illegal Roma camps was one of the tools used. The ethnographic fieldwork behind this article involved following the daily activities of a mobile medical unit dedicated to Roma camps in Rome and monitoring a health care project led by a nongovernmental organization. This analysis focuses on one particular dimension of precarious forms of Roma citizenship that the health care policies have developed to address Roma issues: the international mobility dynamics relating to health issues, which drive subjects into a forced integration of multiple, incomplete, and fragmentary medical approaches.
Cette contribution est issue d’une enquête ethnographique portant sur l’activité d’une unité mobile de santé publique mise en place spécifiquement dans les « campi rom » (camps roms) de Rome. A ...partir d’observations de consultations médicales, elle analyse les relations entre les représentants des institutions et la population rom. Observer ce qui se passe lors des activités de soin permet de relever la dimension étatique de la vie quotidienne dans un contexte de précarité extrême, ainsi que la justice sociale qui s’y exprime. Le sentiment moral qui traverse de façon constante et réciproque ces interactions est la méfiance. Cet article se concentre sur les différents usages de ce sentiment, de la part des Roms et du personnel médical, et sur ses effets sur les enjeux de santé et de contrôle dans les « campi rom » de la capitale italienne.
PDF
