Policy Press

Home-Land: Romanian Roma, Domestic Spaces and the State

By Rachel Humphris

Published

Mar 26, 2019

Page count

256 pages

Browse the series

Global Migration and Social Change

ISBN

978-1529201925

Dimensions

234 x 156 mm

Imprint

Bristol University Press

Published

Mar 26, 2019

Page count

256 pages

Browse the series

Global Migration and Social Change

ISBN

978-1529201949

Dimensions

Imprint

Bristol University Press

Published

Mar 26, 2019

Page count

256 pages

Browse the series

Global Migration and Social Change

ISBN

978-1529201956

Dimensions

Imprint

Bristol University Press
Home-Land: Romanian Roma, Domestic Spaces and the State

In contemporary society, passport checks at nation-state borders are accepted. But what if these checks were happening in our own home? This book is the first intimate ethnography of these governing encounters in the home space between Romanian Roma migrants and local frontline workers.

Focusing on how the nation-state is reproduced within the home, the book considers what it is like to have your legal status, your right to ‘belong’, judged from your everyday domestic life. In essence this book is about the divide between state and family, home-land and home and what it means for the new rules of citizenship.

Rachel Humphris is a Lecturer and Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the School of Politics and International Relations at Queen Mary, University of London. She has held visiting fellowships at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, University of California Berkeley and York University Toronto.

Preface;

Introduction: Romanian Roma, motherhood and the home;

Chapter 1: Home truths: fieldwork, writing and anthropology’s ‘home encounter’;

Interlude: Facebook with Cristina;

Chapter 2: Shifting faces of the state: austerity, post-welfare and frontline work;

Interlude: Disappearing Dinni;

Chapter 3: Romanian Roma mothers: labelling and negotiating stigma;

Interlude: Remembering Brussels with Georgeta;

Chapter 4: Intimate bureaucracy and home encounters;

Interlude: Clara’s Belgian torte;

Chapter 5: Gender and intimate state encounters;

Interlude: Losing Sophia and Angela;

Chapter 6: Borders and intimate state encounters;

Conclusion: Homemade state: intimate state encounters at the margins;