Paper long abstract:

The research on which our presentation is based (see: www.edumigrom.eu) looks in a comparative way into how youth of minority origin see their future and what kind of relationship they have with their school as well as with the minority and majority society. We also study the institutional as well as informal forms of ethnicization and its relation to the changing regimes of social inequalities. The research explores how children relate to different forms of "othering" and community-building. In the course of data gathering both quantitative and qualitative methods were used, however in this paper we will focus only our ethnographic investigation in two schools and one urban neighborhood in a "post-industrial" town situated in the south of Hungary.

In our presentation we will outline how social status, embeddedness and social mobility of Roma people - or the lack of all these - influence the ways in which they relate to majority ethnic categorization imposed on them and to their own Roma/Gypsy self-identification. Our researched population is characterized by marginal social situation, ranging from extreme misery, through day-to-day survival, to the uncertain opportunities provided by the black market or the labor market.