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Paper short abstract

Ethnography between the Slovak Roma settlement and Page Hall/Eastwood (Sheffield–Rotherham, UK) shows how institutional risk epistemologies meet migrants’ situated city knowledges. Recognition events and community infrastructures enact care-and-repair, re-stitching polarized dwelling and belonging.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how polarized urban territories are not only navigated but actively recomposed through transnational connections between the segregated Roma settlement of Letanovce and reputationally marked neighborhoods in Northern England. Based on multi-sited ethnography, I analyze how Romani households mobilize and convert economic, social, cultural, and symbolic resources across sites and how urban reputations and classification regimes in housing, schooling and work condition what becomes legible as “respectable,” credible, and thus actionable.

Rather than treating Letanovce as a rural origin external to “the city,” I approach it as a transnational counter-site that generates urban imaginaries, moral evaluations, and status benchmarks that travel with migrants and feed back into settlement hierarchies. I contrast institutional epistemologies of risk and respectability with migrants’ situated knowledges of safe routes, reliable intermediaries, and reputational cartographies of the city. Mobility recalibrates ethnic visibility: some households cultivate institutional legibility, while others sustain enclave-oriented repertoires within contested urban boundaries.

Empirically, I trace differentiated dwelling regimes ranging from institutionally stabilized pathways to precarious circuits shaped by informalized labor and housing insecurity. Key turning points appear as recognition events—encounters where attendance records, tenancy histories, references, and reputational cues translate everyday competencies into institutional trust. Finally, I show community infrastructures enact grassroots care-and-repair—administrative translation, service navigation, and the practical repair of broken institutional encounters—creating alternative spaces that re-stitch fractured urban socialities while also producing new boundaries of respectability. I argue these practices open contingent possibilities for belonging in a polarized city, even as they reshape the settlement–city divide.