Paper short abstract:

Drawing on a long-term ethnographic research among Slovak Romani migrants in Great Britain, this paper asks how migration experiences and yearnings for ‘going up’ become one of the most desired future-oriented mobilities for previously marginalized Roma in Slovakia against the backdrop of their post-socialist pasts and present.

Paper long abstract:

Based on ethnographic research among Slovak Romani networks migrating between Slovakia and Great Britain, this paper examines development of imagining 'England as a great splendour' and it shows how it generates powerful hopes and hopefulness for greater existential and socio-economic mobilities embodied in the figure of successful Angličanos migrant. It analytically examines this intensification of yearnings for particular self-transforming projects imagined as located in spatio-temporal elsewheres in relation to the bodily dispositions acquired during late socialist period in Czechoslovakia and ‘post-socialist’ present marked by shifting towards racialized workfare in neoliberal state in Slovakia. Following the redrawing of geopolitical borders and mobility regimes after Slovakia accessed EU in 2004, many Romani families migrated to British cities and their experiences were shaped by everyday encounters with past and present postcolonial migrants. The successful migrants established new hierarchies and contributed to the crystallizing of the image of England as a space of future-oriented hope expressed in the category of 'going up'. The mobility established itself as a potential avenue to carve out a sense of a viability against the oppressive circumstances and the asymmetrical relations with non-Roma and with non-related Roma. This paper explores ways in which the particular dispositions and past experiences orient their imagining of the ‘West’ as yearnings for more autonomy in the shrinking spaces of hope in Slovakia but also how these are relationally readjusted in relation to transforming forms and intensities of racism and bordering in Slovakia but also across uneven European spaces. This paper explores under which conditions have this future-making through mobilities become so forceful and unevenly distributed while also considering alternative pathways for hoping within these networks that develop and transform over time.