Paper short abstract:

Against the backdrop of securitising narratives surrounding the mobility of Roma from Eastern Europe to Italy, I will bring to the fore the lived experiences of movement of Roma women living in precarious conditions in Rome. They reinvest with meaning movement, immobility, borders and spaces.

Paper long abstract:

Against the backdrop of securitising narratives surrounding the mobility of Roma from Eastern Europe to Italy, the paper will bring to the fore the lived experiences of movement of Roma women living in precarious conditions in Rome. From their dwellings—temporary housing arrangements, official camps, 'illegal' settlements or 'reception centres' perpetually under threat of eviction—they recount their movements between states and places as they try to navigate economic hardship, the (im)mobility imposed by states' regulations of movement, and personal contingencies. While academic and activist discourses tend to reject the notion of 'nomadism' applied to Eastern European Roma as a discursive instrument of exoticisation, romanticisation, and othering, the movement of Roma women recounting their experiences points to contemporary forms of 'socio-economic nomadism', in which Roma from Eastern Europe multiply and manage their spatial mobilities to contest and resist the social (and sometimes spatial) immobility which often seems imposed on them. After exposing the ambiguous securitisation narratives portraying Eastern European Roma either as a threat to the 'civilised' subjects of the nation-state, or as a danger to themselves—and often both at the same time—I summon fragments from the life stories of Roma women to reconstitute the moments of their mobilities spurred by those narratives, and their lived experiences of movement across state and urban borders and spaces. In the process, movement and immobility, borders and spaces are reinvested with meaning.