Paper Short Abstract:

The paper explores how material devices and infrastructures, as well as their sensorial perceptions, “do” forms of (in)security that self-perpetuate and reify precarious Roma in the peripheries of Rome as dangerous subjects to be forever policed.

Paper Abstract:

In Italy, precarious Roma are often relegated to the so-called campi nomadi – encampments characterized by faulty infrastructure and service neglect, and sources of powerful territorial stigma for their inhabitants. This Roma population has been subjected to securitarian modes of governance, where security measures, institutions, and mechanisms were created to police campi nomadi inhabitants: surveillance cameras and monitoring systems, special police forces, regular institutionalized patrols around the camps.

I ground my argument in ethnographic fieldwork on formal and informal policing of the Roma carried out in the peripheries of Rome, and examine how material devices and infrastructures, as well as their sensorial perceptions, “do” forms of (in)security that self-perpetuate and reify the Roma as dangerous subjects to be forever policed. My argument proposes to analytically and methodologically move past the distinction between things and the meanings of insecurity attached to them in various contexts, exploring how matter and the sensorial perceptions of it quietly fabricate insecurity in complex and unpredictable chains of associations. In doing so, I engage with literature on new materialism and with sensorial anthropology to critique the exclusive focus on speech acts contained in the so-called Copenhagen School of critical security studies, and explore the value of anthropological approaches grounded in ethnographic fieldwork to critical security studies.