The project focused on how Roma migrants from the Danube plain and the Balkans, along with older related autochthonous communities of Manouche or Calé, negotiate “shadowspace” with longer-present Mediterranean Rim (especially Maghrebi) Muslim migrant communities, newer Muslim arrivals from West Asia (especially Syrian and Afghan refugees), and the various bounded Romani groups formed by temporally discrete migrations, alongside the other non-Romani populations we refer to here. The PI considered relationships between different “pariahs” sharing the same sort of marginal space—underpasses, urban forests, abandoned lots, and subterranean passages, for example—to develop an understanding of the balance of evasion and resistance, on the one hand, and exclusion, expulsion, and confinement, on the other, in the use of such zones, an interest the PI developed from initial explorations in India. The results have been substantial. One of the largest, most important outcomes, results or products from this project thus far has been in the broader impacts, applied, and dissemination domains. During the course of—and because of—this grant, the PI was asked to become commissioning co-director/co-curator for a major museum exhibit at the Musée des Civilisations de l’Europe et de la Mediterranée (MuCEM), described below, that represents a satisfying incarnation of the NSF project’s commitment to public engagement, dissemination, and collaborative work. In terms of intellectual merit, this work scrutinized the very notion of marginality. The PI sought to shed light on how spatial and social margins intersect and suggested that social peripheries and spatial peripheries, where we are able to observe them as discrete forms, each reveal something about the other’s nature, and, collectively, about marginality more broadly. The objective of this ethnographic focus—comprising at its heart the mapping of emergent, dynamic interactions of social “undesirables” with each other within shared spaces—was to learn something about whether and how people in such spaces see each other variably either as belonging to the same category or, by contrast, as interlopers in proprietary space; whether they feel themselves to be on some kind of social periphery, external to society-at-large; and whether and how they are co-policed by virtue of their shared status and location. The merit of the project was thus in particular its exploration of the formation, recombination, and crystallization of solidarities, frictions, and complex aggregations at the social margin, by which the PI means among people kept outside of, spurned by, and excluded from dominant social forms and spaces. The broader impacts of this project were in its potential to expose troubling, coercive and often explicitly violent modes of social control (by private citizens, states and municipalities alike) over people often lacking in means and choices, and to make policy recommendations aimed at their protection; to observe where such dynamics may result in critical suffering, with the end of drawing nongovernmental, scholarly, and media attention to it; and to point at-risk people lacking basic rights and citizenship to safe spaces and services. Processes documented in this study also facilitated broader observations of contradictions in European discourses of rights and inclusion, and sparked wider debates and discussion on the matter with the goal of encouraging humane policies informed by research. Other broader impacts included efforts to problematize and draw attention to relatively little-inspected processes of segregation, and especially to ask how segregation can function relatively rigidly and with startling homogeneity, without juridical mechanisms to enforce it, across multiple national boundaries in a multicultural Europe; to advise policymakers and institutions of culture on new approaches to this question; to work with the Musée des Cultures de l’Europe et de la Mediterranée on the development of a major global exhibition on Roma; to develop from that effort lasting structures of community leadership and indigenously-informed representation; to work with schools in the Var and Bouches-du-Rhône region on incorporating appropriate language materials for Roma and refugees, and questions of racism as regards Romani communities, into their curricula; and to contribute to the authoring, in conjunction with legal advocacy organizations, of stricter guidelines on legal rights of Romani and refugee squatters. Another broader impact came in the form of opportunities for Romani and refugee research assistants and translators.  Some of the broader impacts may be felt simply through the project’s life in a city and its communities: multiple opportunities have arisen to mentor young scholars, activists, curators, undergraduates, and graduate students at the primary fieldsite, along with an undergraduate the PI’s home institution. The PI has through the project also engaged in expansive conversations with workers at/of Architectes sans Frontières, Medecins du Monde, and other organizations, to provide enriched cultural information. the PI had the opportunity to develop dialogue with a number of Roma activists from Marseille, Toulon, and Montpelier on ethnographic method; some of those will work with us as translators and "guides" in the next research phase. 

Last Modified: 01/28/2023
Modified by: Jonah A Steinberg