Nov
Research Seminar in Sociology of Law with Marc H. Vallés (Postponed to November 29)
The Sociology of Law Department arranges a series of research seminars inviting local and international social scientists to present state-of-the-art research within various areas of law and society.
Subalternity and strategies of sociocultural reproduction in the face of assimilationist law
A case study of the Roma Spoitori under Romanian communism of Ceausescu
The official historiographical discourse offers a socio-economic emancipatory narrative of the Roma population under communist rule in Romania. While it is true that a majority saw their economic situation improve and benefited from integration into educational institutions, these policies sought the cultural assimilation of Roma whose legal status was that of a 'social minority' rather than a 'national/cultural minority'. However, 7% of the nomadic and semi-nomadic Roma population could circumvent these assimilationist devices for a few decades and preserve their identity by deploying specific strategies of social reproduction outside governmental domination. This was the case of the Spoitori, a Roma group currently settled in the plains of the Muntenia region (Romania), whom I could interview during the fieldwork I carried out during my pre-doctoral research phase.
Marc H. Vallés is an Associate Professor at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and Universitat de Girona (Spain), where he teaches the History of Law, Comparative Legal Systems and Political Communication and Public Opinion from a critical and decolonial perspective. He holds a PhD with international mention from the University of Girona with a thesis on legal anthropology entitled "Ethnographic analysis of the Spoitor community in the commune of Gradistea (Romania): Processes of identification and mechanisms of domination". He was a visiting researcher at the University of Lund in the Department of Sociology of Law in 2019. He is the author of publications such as "The persistent oppression of Roma in the legal field: from outlaws to epistemic violence (with Ida Nafstad)", "Researching the Roma in Criminology and Legal Studies: Experiences from Urban and Rural Participant Observation, Interviews and Surveys (with Lorena Molnar)" and "El proceso de construcción y categorización de la alteridad: la categoría 'tigani/gitano'en la historia de Rumanía", among others.
About the event
Location:
Room M331, 3rd floor, Allhelgona Kyrkogata 18 (Hus M), Lund
Contact:
ida [dot] nafstad [at] soclaw [dot] lu [dot] se