Transnational mobility and new forms of disconnect: Czech and Slovak Roma migrations to Great Britain and Canada

 

 

The paper explores emerging forms of transnational mobility and new forms of disconnect among Czech and Slovak Roma migrants to Great Britain and Canada.

 

 

Based on a long-term anthropological fieldwork among networks of Roma/Gypsy migrants from Slovakia and Czech Republic, this paper examines two migratory pathways to urban areas of Great Britain and Canada. Following the accession of new member states to EU in 2004, many Slovakian Roma migrated to Britain. Additionally, many Czech and Slovak Roma sought asylum in Canada in the last decade. These migration movements were said to be driven by a search of a 'better life.' The paper ethnographically explores what does this striving for betterment mean, how is it imagined and what the key tropes through which Roma experience these movements are. It also juxtaposes this striving with transforming conceptualisations of home and belonging under mobile circumstances. It follows with a historical overview of different migratory pathways these Roma networks participated during socialist and postsocialist period. By analysing social trajectories of migrants the paper also shows unequally distributed social connections and other forms of capital translate differentially into degrees of success and failures in migration. The paper explores how the migration dynamics simultaneously accentuate new forms of disconnect and abject among those who do not migrate or those who return from their migrations more impoverished. Theoretically, the talk also reflects on the uncritical assumptions often made in relation to Roma/Gypsy migrations as an imagined prototype of hyper-mobile subjects.