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Accepted Paper:
Home Balloon. The prints of belonging and uncertainty in the international mobility of Romanian Roma
Stefania Toma
(Romanian Institute for Research on National Minorities and Babeș-Bolyai University)
The relative well-defined concept of HOME becomes fluid in the context of uncertainties and mobilities. In my paper I will discuss the practices and aspirations of ethnic Roma who are engaged in international migration. Their Home is flexible, site of belonging but also that of vulnerabilities.
Paper long abstract:
The concept of Home is something that is easy and in the same time difficult to define. Nevertheless, for many people building a Home or losing a Home is in the center of their life-projects. This is the case of the often marginalized Roma minority, who recently engage in international migration, many of them with the aspiration to build a better home for their children. Their mobility had visible effects in the local physical and social space. Their new constructions changed the landscape of the localities. These changes in their turn affected the local social relations with the local majority population.
But these continuously transformative mobilities (or effects of it) are in contrast with the aspiration of the Roma persons and families who move to be at Home. For them, Home means belonging (or attempt to belong) to larger or smaller communities that can be achieved either through their presence (they come home) or even absence (they only build the house and go back abroad). In both cases, the material expression of belonging is important because it is situated in the present and is a reference point for the future seeded in the past.
I will bring ethnographic examples coming from long-term fieldwork in Roma communities and more recently from the HOMInG ERC project (Univ. of Trento).