The Romanì ethnic mobilization in Italy: an intersectional and generational perspective

Scholarship on Romanì activism in Italy is still in its infancy. Most of the works on Romanì communities in Italy focuses on their marginalization and exclusion. Very little attention has been paid to their strategies of resistance and collective action. The scarcity of research on the engagement in collective action of Romanì subgroups, such as Romanì women and Romanì youth, is even more pronounced. A growing body of work underlines the additional challenges experienced by Romanì women activists resulting from living and operating in contexts characterized by the entanglement of anti-Gypsyism and sexism, as well as on the specific activist efforts they carry out moving from their specific positionality. On the whole, however, this body of work is still limited and mostly focused on Central and Eastern European countries and Spain, overlooking the developments in this sense in the Italian context. Moreover, the literature focusing on Romanì younger generations point to differences compared to older generations of activists in the ways they organize, the repertoires of action they adopt, and the actions they see as constituting activism. However, also in this case, the body of work is limited and has so far focused on (mostly transnational) Romanì youth networks, overlooking the experiences of engagement of younger activists in national mobilizations, and even more so in areas of mobilization not primarily targeting Romanì youth, and the processes of change they have sparked. The present work aims to contribute to filling these gaps by exploring how different systems of oppression, and particularly those based on anti-Gypsyism, classism and sexism, together with differences in terms of generational belonging, shape the Romanì ethnic mobilization in Italy and the activist trajectories of Romanì people engaged in it. By adopting an intersectional and generational perspective, it aims at contributing to shedding light on the internal processes of change that have taken place since the inception of the Romanì ethnic mobilization in Italy and on its internal diversity and complexity. My fieldwork was carried out throughout the Italian territory from June 2021 to February 2023. It involved participant observation during protests, flashmobs and picket lines, art exhibitions, theater plays, conferences, book launches, training courses for teachers and social workers and internal training courses for Romanì activists organized by Romanì-led organizations, networks and informal groups, and single Romanì activists, operating in the Italian context. I also carried out semi-structured interviews with Roma and Sinti women and men activists of different ages and who started their activist paths at different points in time in the last three decades. Finally, I consulted documents produced by Romanì and pro-Romanì organizations and individual Romanì activists, reports, minutes of meetings, press, etc., and I also monitored the social media pages and websites of organizations, networks and individual activists. Through the exploration of the research questions and the research process just described, more broadly, this dissertation also seeks to contribute to exploring the fruitfulness of adopting an intersectional and generational perspective to the study of collective action, and especially that of racialized and essentialized minorities. Furthermore, it engages with the debate on the borders of political agency and aims at enlarging the scope of what constitutes political action in academic research/debate, by also including less blatant forms of activism. This effort is particularly relevant when discussing the political agency of racialized groups, such as Romanì communities, because the social and political marginalization to which they are subjected often prevents more visible, institutionalized, and massive forms of participation.