Mittwoch, 10.04.2024
“We’ll help ourselves, but what’s in it for us?” The logics of top-down “empowerment” and bottom-up resistance among Roma development subjects
16:00 - 17:30 Uhr
online, https://zoom.us/meeting/register/tJcudumspj4oHNK6v16kZaTYtphyuo5zMm8e
Anmeldung ist erforderlich; Anmeldung beim Veranstalter bis 10.04.24
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Vortragende/r
Dr. Ana Ivasiuc // European Association of Social Anthropologists
Ana Ivasiuc is a social anthropologist whose doctoral research project focused on development practices targeting Roma and their resistance to policy and development interventions. For the past years, she turned to studying practices of formal and informal policing of racialised Others like Roma. She is a co-convenor of the Anthropology of Peace, Conflict, and Security research network (APeCS), and is currently serving as president of the European Association of Social Anthropologists.
Weitere Informationen
Roma groups in Europe have been the protracted subject of dynamics of repression and racism. Simultaneously, though, they also constitute a target group for policy and development interventions that are often directed from a top-down logic. Through the ethnographic study carried out in a Roma non-governmental organization tasked with the implementation of a World Bank-funded “empowerment” project, I examine the dynamics of top-down “empowerment” and bottom-up resistance to such interventions. I focus on moments of conflict during the implementation of the project and ask what such moments can teach us about both empowerment and resistance within the development paradigm. I take the development encounter to be the locus where conflicting logics – on the one hand of the development apparatus with its layered power dynamics, and on the other hand of Roma communities equally layered in terms of social inequality and power – reveal themselves. From the analysis of the forms of bottom-up resistance that I have examined in my research, I then scale up to forms of Roma activism that have been instrumental in Europe to solidify a development paradigm not only riddled with contradictions, but also deeply depoliticizing.
Suggested reading:
Ivasiuc, Ana. 2020. ‘We’ll Help Ourselves, but What’s in It for Us?’ Conflict, Development and Social Mobility among Roma from Romania. Slovenský národopis/ Slovak Ethnology 68(4): 365–78. https://doi.org/10.2478/se-2020-0021.
Clark, C. (2017, in press) ‘Romani activism and community development: are mediators the way forward?’, in Craig, C. (editor) Community Organising Against Racism: Race, Ethnicity and Community Development, Bristol: Policy Press. p.185-198
Veranstalter
Unit for Peace and Conflict Studies