In the last days of June 2024, our team members, Kamila Fiałkowska and Ignacy Jóźwiak, participated in the inaugural conference of The RUTA Association for Central, South-Eastern, Eastern European, Baltic, Caucasus, Central, and Northern Asia Studies in Global Conversation which took place in Ukraine, in Transcarpathia region.
Ignacy Jóźwiak, together with Svitlana Odynets (Northumbria University), proposed a panel titled “Transnational Spaces at Turbulent Times: Polyphony of Voices, Cacophony of Interpretations, and Heterotopia of Solidarities.” This panel featured the following presentations:
- Svitlana Odynets (Northumbria University) Transnational Solidarities and Tensions in the Space between Suceava and Chernivtsi in late Autumn 2023
- Kamila Fiałkowska, Ignacy Jóźwiak, (University of Warsaw) Ukrainian Roma – Forced Migrants with a Question Mark
- Julia Buyskykh (University College Cork), Empathic Ruptures: Thinking Beyond Colonial Epistemologies
- Eleonora Narvselius (Lund University) Witnessing the War Against Ukraine: European Challenges of Configuring the Crisis in Literature, Theatre, and Museums
We are thankful to Panayiotis Xenophontos (University of Oxford), who moderated the panel and discussion.
In their presentation, Kamila and Ignacy discussed selected aspects of research on minoritized communities, offering a perspective that encompasses issues of ethnic boundaries, borders, and social hierarchies as experienced and expressed by the Roma from Poland and Ukraine. This included ongoing reflections from the ROCIT project, focusing on Ukrainian Roma arrivals in Poland and their ambivalent reception as forced migrants, with their status often being questioned. This phenomenon was contextualized within the broader historical experiences of marginalization and the questioning of rights afforded to non-Roma populations, such as the history of refuge-seeking Roma in post-WWII Europe or the early 1980s and 1990s from Poland.
The presentation also highlighted Polish Roma mobilization in support of Ukrainian Roma, which we perceive as an enactment of citizenship by a minoritized and racialized group, aimed at safeguarding the rights of another minoritized and racialized group in the context of forced migration. Importantly, the temporary protection allows Ukrainian citizens to move around EU member states in search of employment and social improvement. This provides a case for mobility justice for Roma, whose right to move has been severely and systematically violated in the past through sedentarization policies in the USSR and restrictions on migration through racial profiling and bordering in Europe in the 20th and 21st centuries.
We are profoundly impressed by the organization and the multitude of insightful contributions at this conference. Organizing such an event is always challenging, but doing so in a country actively resisting an invasion is truly extraordinary!
Featured photo: Association RUTA