Around and Around

The Politics of Mobility in Everyday Lives of Roma in current day Hungary

Abstract

Asylum-seeking and significant out-migration have been the response of many Roma communities who continue to face multiple insecurities in their everyday lives, leaving them to their own survival devices. This work seeks to understand how we approach and categorize realities of such internal and cross-border displacements of Roma in current day Hungary. Drawing from an interdisciplinary field of mobilities and borders scholarship, this paper advances the concept of border regimes to approach intersecting regimes of movement control and the dynamics of mobility and enclosure at local and transnational levels.  This lens is translated in the case of protracted Roma family evictions, and their struggles with an externalized border regime in the city of Miskolc, Hungary. Fieldwork accounts and snapshots, deriving from on-going ethnographic research in the city’s ‘Numbered Streets’, Roma-populated, residential neighborhood will provide the premises for empirical investigation.