Research
PhD dissertation
Title: The pedagogy of the racial/colonial nation-state: history, commonsense and anti-Roma racism in post-1989 Romania
Part of this research has been published here.
My doctoral research explored the normalization of anti-Roma racism in post-1989 Romania through the lens of nationalism and racial hegemony. I explored the racialisation of 'nation' as a category of supremacy, and thus the racialisation of 'Romanianness' (national identity) as whiteness. In my view, Romanian nationalism necessitates anti-Roma racism, but also other forms of racism (antisemitism being one prominent example), in order for 'Romanianness' to become a category of white supremacy. To make this argument, I proposed two theoretical moves: 1) I contextualised Romanian nationalism in inter-imperial webs, bound with coloniality (see also Dragoș, 2024); 2) I conceptualised nationalism as a project for (racial) hegemony. Looking at nationalism as a hegemonic project, I therefore interrogated the commonsense - the cultural base - of such hegemony. A large part of what underpins a vision of nationalism as commonsensical is a nationalist reading of the past. Empirically, therefore, I turned to how the past is mobilized for the purposes of racial hegemony in the nation-state framework. More specifically, I analysed how educational materials embody and carry out the 'pedagogy of the state', meaning how they make nationalism commonsense through a racialised articulation of the past, which both supports the articulation of Romanianness as whiteness and the articulation of anti-Roma racism.
MPhil dissertation
Title: State experiments and the temporalized figure of 'the Roma' in the Romanian landscape: the (necro)politics of knowledge production and Roma representations between 1919 and 1945
In this dissertation, I address the construction of the essentialised figure of ‘the Roma’ through state and academic representations and knowledge-production between 1919 and 1945 in Romania. These representations played a part in the Romani Holocaust in Romania. Through a transdisciplinary genealogy which challenges normative historiography, I seek to answer the following questions: (1) In the context of the political destabilization of the Romanian state (i.e. a state-crisis), what function do representations of ‘the Roma’ fulfil?; (2) How do macro histories of Empire and Romania’s geopolitical position shape representations of Romani people?; (3) How does a ‘state of exception’ governing paradigm reflect the Romanian state’s relationship to Roma citizens in and through representations?, and ultimately (4) What role did representations play in legitimizing the marking of Roma as ‘other’ in interwar Romania, and, ultimately, in removing the Romani ‘other’ from the Romanian state? To answer these questions, I analysed representations of Roma in state documents and academic writing produced between 1919 and 1945. I also analysed testimonies of survivors, who were children or youth at the time of deportation. I argue that the genocide was based on, and legitimised through, discourses and representations that constructed a Romani ‘threat’, creating the ‘necessity’ to trigger a state of exception that led to the deportation of Romani communities to Transnistria, where they were left to die. I employed a variety of theoretical perspectives, including Mbembe’s (2019) necropolitics, decolonial theory and Foucauldian notions of power and knowledge. This case of (necro)political representations and knowledge illustrates how the coloniality of power has shaped the figure of ‘the Roma’, and how significantly it can impact people’s lives. This dissertations contributes to discussions around the role of knowledge production economies in the making of atrocities, and the power of a state to educate a polity
about hierarchies of legitimacy.
BA dissertation
This research has been published here.
In this article I explore the responses of Romani students in a segregated school in Romania to majoritarian deficit narratives constructed about them, investigating the specific nature of such deficit discourses and the specific strategies of resistance deployed by the students. To do so, I designed a theoretical framework which fused elements of Foucauldian and Critical Race Theory (CRT). The case study was underpinned by principles of in-depth critical qualitative research, explicitly addressing the racial, political and systemic nature of educational inequalities in Romania. I spent two weeks in a segregated secondary school, in which Romani students were tracked into Romani-only class groups. I observed 12 lessons and interviewed three white Romanian teachers and 11 Romani students. The findings suggested that teachers mobilized deficit discourses about Romani families, culture, cognitive abilities, and potential, reflected in their pedagogical strategies and justifications of Romani students’ ‘school failure’. Students resisted such assumptions through counterstorytelling, naming oppression, class disruption, and refusal of the ‘rules of schooling’, such as homework. I argue that this resistance highlights Romani students’ critical thinking and agency. Among others, the findings indicate the need for urgent change in Romanian teacher training and educational policy.
Dragos, S. (2022). Romani Students’ Responses to Antigypsyist Schooling in a Segregated School in Romania. Critical Romani Studies, 4(2), 122-140. https://doi.org/10.29098/crs.v4i2.95