Roma Migrants in the European Union

Book excerpt: This book situates Roma mobility as a critical vantage point for migration studies in Europe, focusing on questions about Europe, ‘European-ness’, and ‘EU-ropean’ citizenship through the critical lens of Roma racialisation, marginalisation, securitisation, and criminalisation, and the dynamics of Roma mobility within and across the space of ‘Europe’. Enabled primarily through ethnographic research with diverse Roma communities across the heterogeneous geography of ‘Europe’, the contributions to this collection are concerned with the larger politics of mobility as a constitutive feature of the socio-political formation of the EU. Foregrounding the experiences and perspectives of Roma living and working outside of their nation-states of ‘origin’ or ostensible citizenship, the book seeks to elucidate wider inequalities and hierarchies at stake in the ongoing (re-)racialisation of both Roma migrants and migrants in general. Showcasing political, economic, legal, and socio-historical criticism, this book will be of interest to those studying race and racialisation in Europe, mobility and migration into and within Europe, and those studying the mobility of the Roma people in particular. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Social Identities journal.