Historicizing Roma in Central Europe: Between Critical Whiteness and Epistemic Injustice

Description

We look forward to our talk and would like to discuss following questions that led us to writing this book:
How to pose the struggle against anti-Gypsism, if claims of eliminating racism seem to be unrealistic or, even more, bringing risks to historical justice for Romani people?
What is the role of critical whiteness in shaping the agenda of desegregation for Romani people? Who are the potential agents of critical whiteness and what are the specific ways of practicing it in Central and Eastern Europe?
Was nation-building, or more generally, the building of national identities in Central Europe a decisive factor in rooting the segregation of Romani people? What was the historical impact of Central European racially minded experts on legitimizing the segregation of Romani people?
And why do all these questions have a continuing relationship with Czech race science, and the history of state police and medical surveillance across Central Europe?

Victoria Shmidt brings together the issue of historical roots of segregation with the legacy of colonial and socialist policies in Central Eastern European countries. Since 2019 Victoria leads the project “Race science: Undiscovered Power of building the nations” at the University of Graz.

Bernadette Nadya Jaworsky is associate professor of sociology at Masaryk University, Brno (Czech Republic), and Faculty Fellow at Yale University’s Center for Cultural Sociology.