The 'Other' Working Class: An Ethnography of a Racialised Surplus Population among Roma in the Czech Republic

我的研究有可能改变对后社会主义欧洲罗姆工人现实的理论和政策理解。特别是，它的目标是将范式从种族主义罗姆人工人的失业类别转变为就业不足。我在博士期间发表了三篇同行评议的学术期刊文章，证明了我的研究的原创性和意义：在种族与阶级中(《耻辱和种族隔离：遏制奥斯特拉瓦的罗姆人》，2020年；《罗姆人：奥斯特拉瓦的隐形劳动力》，2017年)和《法律与政治经济学杂志》(《捷克种族资本主义下的罗姆人工人》，2021年)。该奖学金将使我能够通过一本独家撰写的学术专著和两篇或更多面向公众的思想文章来扩展和发展我的出版物。拟议的专著以我的博士论文为基础，将有助于研究剩余人口、种族主义和就业的学术理论的前沿。它将通过对种族主义罗姆人工人的生活经历和视角的民族志研究，将这一点带到后社会主义背景下，这一类别在中东欧和其他地区迄今一直没有得到充分的研究和理论化。回应21世纪“相对过剩人口”理论的发展，特别是贝纳纳夫(2020)、尾注(2010、2015)和法里斯(2019)的发展，我将颠覆对“就业”和“失业”范畴的传统理解，并说明种族刻板印象和种族主义的社会和经济政策如何将罗姆工人限制在低薪、不稳定的工作、污名化的社区和债务依赖的特殊方式。我的工作也为后社会主义研究增加了关键的分析层面，这些研究主要关注白人工人阶级民族主义和工人对种族主义的敏感性(Kalb，2021；Szombati，2018)。我的干预的独创性也体现在它的形式上：我把一种人种学方法和发现带到了一场原本主要是理论上的关于剩余人口的辩论中。我使用这些经验数据进行分析，以证明部分去工业化、后社会主义时代劳动力保护的削弱以及资本对劳动力需求的波动，是如何将罗姆工人变成种族主义剩余人口的，这是他们治理不可或缺的结构性条件。重要的是，我还提供了对研究不足且难以触及的家庭债务领域的罕见见解，并利用这些见解构建理论。该联谊会的主要成果将是一本专著《罗马：后社会主义时代的隐形工人》，并由一家领先的大学出版社出版。我的目标出版社是杜克大学出版社(形式理论系列)，它有出版后社会主义民族志的记录。为了向更广泛的受众(包括人权和种族正义领域的政策制定者和实践者)传播我的研究成果，并推广这本专著，研究金将涉及两项额外的活动：与我的导师萨拉·法里斯共同创作的两篇思想文章，目标是《伦敦书评》(《捷径》)、NLR的Sidecar、The Conversation和Eurozine；以及一个题为《罗马：看不见的工人阶级》的电影项目，该项目与视频艺术家托马斯·S·拉法和我的导师本·罗加利合作。这部电影将讲述罗姆工人就业不足的日常现实。它将涉及对奥斯特拉瓦进行有限的进一步研究，使用我在实地考察期间收集的现有材料，以及托马斯·S·拉法的档案录像，他使用CINEMA VERRITé的方法，自2009年以来一直在记录中欧地区的反罗姆人种族主义。该电影项目的目的将是以一种易于获得的形式传播我的博士学位的主要成果，这种形式可用于学术和倡导罗姆人权利(见下文受益人)。

My research has the potential to transform the theory and policy understanding of the reality of Roma workers in post-socialist Europe. In particular, it aims to shift the paradigm away from the category of unemployment of racialised Roma workers towards underemployment. I have demonstrated the originality and significance of my research by publishing three peer-review academic journal articles during my PhD: in Race & Class ("Stigma and segregation: containing the Roma of Údol", 2020; "'Roma: The Invisible Workforce of Ostrava", 2017) and in the Journal of Law and Political Economy ("Roma Workers under Czech Racial Capitalism", 2021). The Fellowship would enable me to extend and develop my publication profile with a sole-authored academic monograph and two or more public-facing thought pieces.The proposed monograph, building on my PhD dissertation, will contribute to the leading-edge of academic theory on surplus population, racialisation, and employment. It will bring this to the post-socialist context, through an ethnographic study of the lived experiences and perspective of racialised Roma workers, a category that has been so far under-studied and under-theorised in East-Central Europe and beyond. Responding to developments in the theory of "relative surplus population" in the 21st century, in particular by Benanav (2020), Endnotes (2010, 2015) and Farris (2019), I will disrupt conventional understandings of categories of "employment" and "unemployment", and illustrate the particular way in which racial stereotypes and racialising social and economic policies confine Roma workers to low paid, precarious jobs, stigmatised neighbourhoods, and dependence on debt. My work also adds a critical layer of analysis to studies of post-socialism that are mostly focused on white working-class nationalism and workers' susceptibility to racism (Kalb, 2021; Szombati, 2018). The originality of my intervention is also in its form: I bring an ethnographic method and findings to an otherwise largely theoretical debate on surplus population. I use these empirical data analytically to demonstrate how partial deindustrialisation, post-socialist weakening of labour protections, and capital's fluctuating demand for labour have turned Roma workers into a racialised surplus population, a structural condition integral to their governance. Importantly, I also provide rare insights into the under-researched and hard to access sphere of household debt, and use these insights to build theory. The primary output from the Fellowship will be a monograph, Roma: The Invisible Workers of Post-socialism, with a leading university press. My target press is Duke University Press (Theory in Forms series), which has a record of publishing ethnographies of post-socialism. To disseminate my findings to a wider audience (including policy makers and practitioners in the field of human rights and racial justice), and to promote the monograph, the Fellowship will involve two additional activities: two thought pieces co-authored with my mentor, Sara Farris, which will target the London Review of Books (Short Cuts), NLR's Sidecar, The Conversation, and Eurozine; and a film project entitled Roma: The Invisible Working Class in collaboration with a video artist, Tomás Rafa, and my mentor, Ben Rogaly. The film will tell the story of the everyday reality of underemployed Roma workers. It will involve limited further research in Ostrava, use the existing material that I gathered during the fieldwork, and archive footage of Tomás Rafa who, using the methods of cinéma vérité, has been documenting anti-Roma racism in the Central European region since 2009. The purpose of the film project will be to communicate the main findings of my PhD in an accessible format, which could be used academically and in Roma rights advocacy (see Beneficiaries below).