2021/05/12 by Remus Creţan, Raluca Narcisa Covaci, Ioan Sebastian Jucu · 1 voice · 1 citation
Health Professions · Social Sciences · #Balkans: History, Politics, Society #Romani and Gypsy Studies #Soviet and Russian History
paper · pdf · doi:10.1080/1070289x.2021.1920774
openalex publication_date 2021/05/12 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
The issue of otherness in the social construction of ethnicities and rural multiculturalism has long attracted the attention of scholars. By following a postcolonial background, this paper investigates the social construction of Roma as ‘other’ in a multicultural landscape (the Romania-Serbia border) using interviews with participants of different ethnic groups. This paper addresses the following questions: (i) Is the Roma population in this area completely spatially segregated? (ii) How do different kinds of prejudice against Roma operate within this multicultural context? (iii) How does discrimination against the Roma interface with power relations, in particular political power in the area? The findings indicate that, alongside ethno-nationalist racism, Roma face prejudice from apparently more ‘progressive’ groups, who accept multiculturalism, yet blame the Roma for their own disadvantaged social and economic position on the grounds of a failure to integrate that is pictured as ‘backward’.