Social Movements and Everyday Acts of Resistance by Stamatis Poulakidakos;Anastasia Veneti;Maria Rovisco; & Veneti Anastasia & Rovisco Maria

Author:Stamatis Poulakidakos;Anastasia Veneti;Maria Rovisco; & Veneti, Anastasia & Rovisco, Maria
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (Unlimited)
Published: 2023-05-17T00:00:00+00:00

Case study: “Whose streets? Our streets!” Building community power with Roma amidst interconnected struggles on Glasgow’s Southside

Romano Lav was founded in 2013 by Marcela Adamova to challenge the racism, discrimination, and disadvantage faced by Roma migrants in Glasgow. Ashli, author of this case study, has worked at Romano Lav since 2016. Whilst a small grassroots organisation based in Govanhill, its anti-racist projects and actions frequently traverse local, national, transnational, and international terrains. This is partly a question of history, as well as one of geography, state violence, and their subjection to “de facto immigration control” (Erel, Murji, & Nahaboo, 2016, p. 1345), with the “Europeanisation” (Vermeersch, 2012) of their racialisation across the continent homogenising their struggle despite their dispersal. Romano Lav thus necessarily fights on multiple fronts simultaneously, but all its projects are united by one overarching objective: the struggle for racial justice, for Roma emancipation, and for the empowerment of Romani youth, in particular.

This is also the context that renders Romano Lav’s praxis intelligible. Beyond street work and grassroots projects that strive to meet immediate community needs and build community power, Romano Lav frequently highlights rights violations experienced by Roma throughout Europe. Features on issues ranging from forced sterilisations and destruction of camps to environmental racism are covered on Roma News and Views – a broadcasting project designed to allow Romano Lav’s youth team to continue working together when estranged elsewhere during lockdown. This initially playful pilot project would go on to play a vital role in generating international press attention in the case of Stanislav Tomáš, a Czech Romani man who died in police custody on the streets of Teplice in June 2021 in a manner hauntingly similar to George Floyd, with police officers kneeling on his neck for several minutes. The young “correspondents” released a “breaking news” segment on social media that featured video footage of Stanislav’s death accompanying Romano Lav’s press statement (Romano Lav, 2021). Less than 24 hours later, their words would feature in the Washington Post (2021). Demanding #JusticeForStanislav, their call proliferated in vigils and protests across Europe, reaching Strasbourg some months later as MEPs debated police brutality towards Roma (Romea, 2021). The anti-racist activism of Romano Lav and the communities that it organises in Govanhill, then, are both shaped by its urban everyday character, but also necessarily transcends it. This is because it is very localised in its spatial context but is simultaneously much bigger given that the struggle for Roma rights and for racial justice is necessarily transnational.

The racialisation of Roma migrants in Govanhill is overdetermined by place and territorial stigma, “such that it has become possible to evoke the ‘Roma problem’ locally without naming Roma at all” (Mullen, 2018, p. 221). Whilst anti-racism has been substantially under-theorised relative to the abundance of scholarship on racism (Bhattacharyya, Virdee, & Winter, 2020; Harris, 2021) and should not be conceptualised as simply racism’s “inverse” (Joseph-Salisbury & Connelly, 2021, p. 6), such “metonymic” forms of racism, where race and place are spatially coded, nonetheless create openings for metonymic anti-racisms to flourish (Elliott-Cooper, 2018).

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