Roma as an Object of Science and State Polices. Knowledge and Citizens in the Making in Post-war Czechoslovakia, 1945–1989
Research area 2: Norms & Transgressions
Contact : nikola.ludlova(@)cefres.cz
My dissertation project traces the history of the knowledge production on Roma in Czechoslovakia between 1945 and 1989. This history is inextricably linked with the so-called ‘Gypsy Question’ as it was primarily the interest of the state in knowledge on Roma what initiated and stimulated research and knowledge production and led to the institutionalization of Roma as an object of science. In line with the socialist ethos of new man, the state social engineering project targeting Roma applied state planning in its effort to assimilate and later integrate these “citizens-in-training” into the society. Various scientific disciplines thus became instrumental to the state employing the scientific management approach to social questions. However, this knowledge production was not solely a state-commissioned enterprise, there were also actors whose interest and academic production on Roma was motivated by individual research interests and who secured the continuity of research regardless of the state interest in this knowledge. Some of these actors despite participating in state commissioned projects became during the period of political thaw in the 1960s open critics of the state assimilatory policies and supporters of and co-activists in the ethno-emancipatory efforts of Roma intellectuals. Knowledge therefore served simultaneously too opposing goals: to legitimize assimilation or ethnoemancipation.
My research is thus a contribution to the scholarship on the larger historiographical question in the history of science, i.e. the mutual interaction between political and scientific realms. Apart from the mentioned instrumentalization of knowledge, I am interested to find out how the establishment of Roma as an object of science enhanced development in these disciplines. In conclusion, I aim to situate the knowledge production in socialist Czechoslovakia within the longer history of knowledge production on Roma and specifically to position it in respect to the field of knowledge termed as Gypsy studies or gypsiology.
Adrien Beauduin is a PhD student at the Central European University, where he devotes his researches to radical right populist political parties in Czechia and Poland. His work focuses on the party members’ individual motivations, socio-political opinions and mobilisation factors, with a particular emphasis on gender and sexuality, and the ways these themes intersect with racial and socio-economic issues.
The interdisciplinary selection jury of the CEFRES mobility grants auditioned 12 candidates on May 27, 2020. It congratulates all the candidates for the high quality of their file and their hearing.
After deliberating, the jury have decided as follows:
Platform CEFRES Grants
Ekaterina Zheltova (Charles University, FSV): Between the Northern Epirus and Chameria: Political, cultural, and linguistic imaginaries in the Albanian-Greek borderlands
Young Fellows Grants
Felipe Kaiser Fernandes (EHESS): Le marché au quotidien : les défis d’une ethnographie du « marché »
Mert Kocak (CEU): Transnational Governance of Displacement, Sexuality and Gender Identity: UNHCR as the Main Actor in Creating a Legal Basis for Asylum-Seeking for LGBT Refugees in Turkey
Waiting list
1. Nikola Ludlová (CEU): Roma as an Object of Science and State Polices. Knowledge and Citizens in the Making in Post-war Czechoslovakia, 1945–1989
2. Véronique Gruca (Univ. Paris-Nanterre): Chamanisme, mort et mines en Mongolie post-communiste
The following candidates are proposed to become « associated fellows » to CEFRES for the year 2020-2021:
Adrien Beauduin (CEU): Réarticulations de genre, sexualité, race et classe dans la droite radicale populiste en Tchéquie et en Pologne
Véronique Gruca (Univ. Paris-Nanterre): Chamanisme, mort et mines en Mongolie post-communiste
Lukáš Kotyk (Charles University, FSV): Nonhierarchical Model of Project Governance
Nikola Ludlová (CEU): Roma as an Object of Science and State Polices. Knowledge and Citizens in the Making in Post-war Czechoslovakia, 1945–1989
Tereza Sedláčková (Charles University, FSV): Multiple bodies in the context of vaccination as a medical practice
We’ve been in lockdown for 20 days. Fariba Adelkhah, a researcher at the International Research Centre of Sciences Po Paris, has been in prison for 300 days in Iran. By posting her face on the websites of academic institutions and research teams in Europe and elsewhere, we want to show the support of the scientific community and urge the French government to do everything possible to secure her release.
Fariba Fariba is in danger. We must act urgently for her.
De-Imperial Europe: a Resentful Confederation of Vanquished Peoples? Raw and Lapsed Memories of Post-Imperial Minorities
Research Area 1 – Displacements, “Dépaysements” and Discrepancies: People, Knowledge and Practices
Contact: johana.wyss@gmail.com
Johana Wyss is a researcher at CEFRES and the Institute of Ethnology, the Czech Academy of Sciences since February 2020. Currently she works with Michèle Baussant on the TANDEM project ‘Europe: a Resentful Confederation of Vanquished Peoples? Raw and Lapsed Memories of Post-Imperial (European) Minorities’. She is also a research member of the V4 Network at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle/Saale in relation to her individual postdoctoral project ‘Memory and Commemoration in Czech Silesia’.
