This article presents a close reading of the Romani characters and their actions in five stories by Viennese Romani writer and activist Samuel Mago and in two stories by his brother, Hungarian ...award-winning journalist Károly Mágó, in their bilingual Romani and German collection glücksmacher – e baxt romani. Brief biographies and an outline of the history of Roma and antiziganism in Austria provide background to textual analysis that focuses on how characters in the stories engender baxt/“Glück,” which means both happiness and luck. This dual meaning has inspired philosophical, psychological, economic, and anthropological studies, but literary scholars have rarely examined the concept in texts by Roma. For the protagonists in the brothers’ stories, happiness and luck become based less on monetary fortunes than on other means to live and survive in dark times of persecution and discrimination. The characters’ decisions unveil perceptions of baxt that rely largely on acquiring food, preserving and passing down family heirlooms, receiving an education, and freeing oneself and one’s family from persecution.
Although intergroup friendships have been shown to reduce prejudice, little research has considered whether interventions fostering intergroup friendship would be effective in highly prejudicial ...contexts. We conducted a quasi‐experiment (N = 61) to test whether a contact‐based intervention based on intergroup friendship could reduce bias against Roma people among non‐Roma Hungarians. Participants in the contact condition engaged in a face‐to‐face interaction with a Roma person, and responded to questions involving mutual self‐disclosure. Through pre‐ and post‐test questionnaires, we observed significant positive change in attitudes and contact intentions among participants in the contact condition, while these effects were not observed among participants in the control condition. Positive change was moderated by perceived institutional norms, which corroborates the potential of contact‐based interventions.
Objective To explore the food insecurity experienced by the Roma population of the Valencian Community (Spain) and the effect of the COVID-19 lockdown. Method Quantitative, cross-sectional ...exploratory study using a questionnaire that collected information on socioeconomic status and situations of food insecurity experienced before and during lockdown, based on the Food Insecurity Experience Scale of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. The questionnaire was applied by health workers from the Roma community with people over 18 years of age. A descriptive analysis was carried out stratifying by sex, calculating Chi-square test to identify differences in the variables of the experiences of food insecurity. Results 468 people participated (57.1% women/42.9% men) who expressed: worry about a lack of food (67.3%); eating the same type of food (37.2%); not being able to eat healthy foods (34.4%); feeling hungry and not being able to eat (9.6%). Around 2.1 percent stated that they could not eat for a whole day, and 65 percent reported that they had to ask for or provide help to be able to eat. When stratifying by sex, it was found that women had more experiences of food insecurity. Except in the case of having stopped eating for a full day, where the percentage remained constant, an increase was observed in the other experiences of food insecurity during lockdown. Conclusions A large part of the Roma population studied, especially women, experienced situations of food insecurity before COVID-19 that were aggravated during lockdown. This situation was compensated for by community support networks.
Gianpiero Cavalleri is Associate Professor of Human Genetics at the Department of Molecular and Cellular Therapeutics at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland and is the lead author of a 2017 ...study into the genetic structure of the Irish Traveller community. The study provided an estimate of when Irish Travellers split from the ‘settled' population in Ireland. This population-based genetic research project involved researchers from the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, University College Dublin, the University of Edinburgh and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and looked into the history and structure of the Traveller population in the context of ‘settled' Irish as well as neighbouring European and Roma Gypsy groups. A full-text version of the study first published in the journal Scientific Reports https://epubs.rcsi.ie/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.ie/&httpsredir=1&article=1100&context=mctart. This interview took place at RCSI on Tuesday 21st November 2017.
This paper summarizes and discusses the key findings of my research on representations of Romani woman in contemporary Polish and Romani literary texts. The first part of this paper discusses Romani ...women’s roles and positions in the Romani community. While the subsequent part describes Romani literature in Poland, the main focus of this article discusses images of Romani women in Polish and Romani literature. The article aims to reveal the process of shaping their description in Romani and Polish literature. The research result shows how the perception of Romani women influenced the artistic imagination of Poles and Roma (female and male) and their literary discourses. The study also indicates the degree of durability or variability of the compared images. The research is significant because of its intent to deepen the understanding of Romani imagology, as well as promoting the discourse of Romani Literature Studies.
The romanticised and stereotyped construction of the Romani people absorbed by mainstream society has contributed to the obliteration of their cultural complexity and their ensuing alienation. The ...present article analyses how the memoir The Stopping Places (2018), by the British Romani writer Damian Le Bas, makes a case for the borderlessness of his people. It is the main purpose of this study to underscore Romani identity as inherently multidirectional, hence allowing for a relational, intercultural dialogue aimed at transcending the long-standing Romani vs. non-Romani tension. For this purpose, Le Bas' network-like journey across some key stopping places is read as an endorsement of the synchronicity and interconnectedness characterising our present world. His narrative is an empowering attestation that foregrounds the fruitful interactions between the Roma and other cultures and sets the assumedly distrustful and protective Romani as an example of cultural flexibility.
People of Romani background are usually labelled as members of an “ethnic minority” and identified along dominantly ethnicized notions and markers. Discursively, this neglects individuals’ different ...self-perceptions and multiple belongings. This contribution looks at interactional data and material from workshops conducted in Germany as part of the EU-wide initiative RoMed (Mediation for Roma). The initiative aimed to strengthen opportunities for local participation by people of Romani background in various European cities and communities between 2011–2017. A conversation analytical approach (e.g. at practices of categorization) is used to examine excerpts from group discussions ahead of a meeting with public officials. From an intersectional perspective I look at how boundaries are drawn, blurred, or destabilized between issues of religiosity and ethnicity. The article discusses boundary-drawing as a symbolic ordering process, highlighting the hegemonic discourses which are reproduced and challenged in the investigated linguistic material. The boundaries drawn and negotiated show the delicate balance between the staging of ethnic and religious affiliations and concerns and their political mobilization.
This book offers an in-depth exploration into the current educational climate and the impact of these policy measures for Roma people in seven Western and Southern European countries and seeks to ...raise awareness of this forgotten minority and to assess the policies implemented to integrate the Roma people into the education system.
In Gypsies in Contemporary Egypt sociologist Alexandra Parrs draws on two years of fieldwork to explore how Dom identities are constructed, negotiated, and contested in the specifically Egyptian ...national context. With an eye to the pitfalls and evolution of scholarly work on the vastly more studied European Roma, she traces the scattered representations of Egyptian Dom, from accounts of them by nineteenth-century European Orientalists to their portrayal in Egyptian cinema as belly dancers in the 1950s and beggars and thieves more recently.
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