Constructing Roma Migrants: European Narratives and Local Governance

On May 9 the INTEGRIM Junior Research Fellows Stefano Piemontese and Tina Magazzini held an interesting seminar on different possible angles to look at the under-researched concept of ‘Roma westward migration’ and discussed it both as a helpful bridge between the two disciplines of migration and diversity management, as well as a way to raise methodological and ethical concerns of researchers working on this topic.

Over the past decades, the integration of minorities and migrants in Europe has become a highly topical and politicized issue, often framed as a social problem. This has fueled a rich academic production on ethnicity, cultural rights and migration, but such studies tend to remain compartmentalized according to discipline and to the population and/ or country analyzed.  As a result, the two fields of diversity management and of migration research have so far generally been studied in isolation from each other, and Roma studies in particular have come to occupy an academic position of ‘splendid isolation’ (Willems 1997, McGarry 2017).

The seminar was jointly organized by the Center for Policy Studies and the Migration Research Group at CEU.