Thank you

The dissertation is done. I just sent it off to the three professors of the commettee. It was 248 pages, 1,28 kg...

Again, I want to thank all of you who intervened in this blog, making it a really enriching experience for me.

THANK YOU

This blog is going to stay open, because it conserves two years of my work, and it will be useful for me to come back to it and get inspirations, memories, keep the track of my job and make changes of directions possible.
Keeping this blog was really helpful for me.

I also hope this blog was helpful for the readers...especially for those interested in Romani life in history all over the world. If anyone has suggestions on how to improve such research experience, please do not hesitate to post comments here.

Keep up the work, if you are in the field. Time is passing and it does not wait for absolute innovative discoveries. Your research comes up from banal, everyday and little things. Keep your eyes open, and fill up your notebook!

I will continue to post in this blog if my topic will stay the same in the future. Othewise it may well be that I will open a new blog...this time with friends, as being part of a community is only helpful for your work. I'll notify here if this will happen.

Notes - random

Comparison: Pescara-Cluj. Everyday idioms of identification. Local knowledge and political framework.
Florence-Pescara - brief sketch of a comparative framework for further research. Main source: Almagisti 2006.

Citizenship. First variable is public sense and understanding of Roma. Belonging to the urban polity - access to rights / perceprions of being part of a (local / national) community.

Citizenship as perception coming from presence/lack of practical enjoyment of social/civil/political rights.

Roma/Gypsies as constructed/crystallized entities - goals of those constructions: often political, i.e. access to resources, negotiations of ways to access, framing strategies from which to understand the nodes of conflicts between Top and Bottom of society structure.
But there is not always necessarily a goal - hetergenesis of goals in Florence (regional laws=) eternalizing situations...like camps at first conceived as temporary.

So - there is a legacy - a path dependency trap which "works"...as ethnicity does.

Roma/Gypsies as 'ethnic' constructions - limited cognitive space within which Gypsiness can work - who sets the limits? Politics and grassroots - rooted in the everyday understanding and local order - alike.

History/social history: lenses through which to understand the dyachronicity of ethnicity/citizenship. Where exactely to look? Newspapers (media discourse - Pescara) Report Iris - Cluj. How does exclusion work? Everyday nationalism (Pescara and Cluj) - main ground of comparison.

Conclusion: multicultural city - lack of basis to think a living together...nationalist thinking...cognitive framework (ethnicity) - Brubaker et. al...- strongly exclusionary...
Possible implications for public policy (hat tip Perfectmothers:) - especially in Italy, but also for EU directives...an in-depth view of local dynamics of cultural construction of groups can help understand the extent to which European-wide policies for social inclusion are effective, and if it would be better to switch to locality-based interventions...maybe funding local Romani NGO or associations.

Another advice

Share your work with other people...it improves so much.

Innovation...

I thought that since I am approaching the end of this pathway, it would be good to have some sorts of guidelines or good tips to carry on reflexively the job that I am in. Today I want to begin with a conference held by a scholar that I sometimes quoted in this blog, Craigh Calhoun.


Here he speaks about "Interdisciplinarity, innovation and informing the public". In other words, how we, academics, can improve and work on our ways of communication. Not only in our writing, teaching and conferencing...but also in our administrative activities and in university social life. I think they are useful thoughts to learn from. Enjoy the video.

New last period

I am going to leave New York with many provocative and fascinating insights on my dissertation. Especially I could benefit from a paper on the 'ethnomanagement' of Hungarians and Germans in Romania - for the institutional part. And from the criticism I received straight after my presentation. I'll revise some of the assumptions and add material. I hope tomorrow I'll be able to have access to the Columbia library for a last check. I'll see.
I had the chance to meet excellent scholars, and such experiences is what is able - in my case - to turn a good work in an excellent one...

Done

Columbia is done as well. Now I have one month to put together all the pieces of the dissertation in a logic, consistent and good shape. I'll mainly concentrate on the premises and the conclusion, and will put the ethnographic findings only in a concise form. I think I need to make the point and leave to articles the empirical material. But it is a decision yet to come.

New York is showing its spring.

Last steps...

People,

this blog was opened two years ago in order to account for an in fieri Ph.D. dissertation in Sociology that has costed time, energies, tears and smiles. Surely, it has meant work every single day, apart from few short and empowering trips since last summer. Now I am approaching the end, and I would like to start to thank all of the people who intervened in this blog since the beginning, and in so doing contributed to improve my understanding - of the social world, and of myself alike. Thank you very much!
Yet the pathway is not at its end - have to submit in a month - there are still a couple of open questions that circulate in my mind, and I will let this blog host them. Next week I'm going to the world convention on nationalism at Columbia to present a paper on Cluj, a rather postmodern analysis of the ways people I came across during fieldwork frame Roma issues. I'll not be disappointed if I'll not win the special prize for doctoral papers...I just want to test my overall approach and capability to bring a contribution to the existing knowledge.


I'll post soon other novelties, and other clues about the book. Keep staying with us!

London

A post about the city where I am right now...(writing in a coffee shop in Kingsway...very postmodern...).
In comparison with Paris there is one thing that really stricks me. Not less energetic, not slower, not less beautiful, not less stylish. London is simply sadder, and more stressed! When walking on a street at 9 am, in Kingsway for example, you feel a sort of competition between people walking around you. In Paris that never happened to me. On the contrary, in public spaces in Paris I was feeling relaxed even when I was in a hurry.
LSE conference is stimulating, but international relations and political science is not really my environment.