Presentation short abstract

We claim that environmental justice research and practice in Eastern Europe has displayed an insidious form of whiteness. In this presentation we show how infrastructural and performative dehumanisation deepen white supremacy and privilege against a Roma community in Romania.

Presentation long abstract

In Eastern Europe, whiteness functions as a structuring racial logic that organizes space and hierarchies of belonging.Environmental justice research in this region has mostly been blinded by whiteness, being split between human rights-oriented research on discrete Roma communities and environmental justice studies animated by raceless engagements of highly visible environmental conflicts. Underlying both of them is a taken-for-granted irrelevance of whiteness as organizing principle of racial capitalism. Drawing on a long-term case study of Roșia Montană (2005-2024) and its Roma community of Dăroaia (2018-2024), we advance the conceptual pair of infrastructural and performative dehumanisation as interrelated processes that sustain whiteness or what has recently been called “gadjo-ness” (Matache 2025). Building dehumanizing infrastructures maintains white privilege, while the everyday performance of dehumanization deepens white supremacy. We achieve a deep integration of theory and methodology by critically engaging with the case of Roșia Montană, which was saturated with progressive but race-blind social movements, and with our own racially-unaware work. Realizing the insidiousness of Whiteness was prompted by an unexpected interaction in the field, which made us enlarge our initially liberal conception of Roma environmental injustice. We collected our data in mid-2024, consisting of 31 interviews with Roma men and women, local authorities and others, and direct observations in Dăroaia. Our results show how whiteness is both inscribed in space and performed as mundane practice, both of which perpetuate whiteness as organizing principle of racial capitalism. Based on these insights, we advocate a reconsideration of insidious whiteness in environmental justice research in EasternEurope.