Dr Ashli Mullen

Racialised Capitalism at the Margins: an ethnography with Roma migrant workers

This book aims to elucidate how racialised capitalism operates today, as illustrated by the experiences of Roma migrant workers. Working against the grain at the interstices of ethnography and discourse analysis, it is based on over three years of ethnographic fieldwork (2016-2020), supplemented by new research using digital methods carried out throughout the pandemic with former participants as Co-Researchers. In examining the racialisation of Roma in the press, on the street, at the workplace, and by the state, the book’s key contribution to knowledge is in rendering explicit the links between welfare chauvinism, economic exploitation, and deportability in the racialisation of Roma migrants in the UK. Whilst welfare controls and immigration controls have long been depicted as ‘two sides of the same coin’ (Anderson, 2015), this book concretely shows what the state enables capital to do, what it gets in return, and illustrates how the dual assault of welfare chauvinism and the hostile environment is harnessed by capital to enable new forms of hyper-exploitation and extraction. 

By drawing on diverse theoretical traditions – including sociological theories of racism, Marxist theory, critical political economy, value-form theory, feminist theories of social reproduction, critical migration studies, historical sociology, biopolitics, and cultural studies – it offers an original, empirically-grounded, and theoretically-rich analysis of the racialisation of Roma migrants. In doing so, it challenges accounts that reify culture at the expense of structural determinants of oppression, as exemplified by the ‘culturalist’ explanations both within and beyond Romani Studies (which has been characterised by its ‘splendid isolation’ (Willems, 1998) from other academic disciplines). In this respect, its value in realising the goals of the ISRF is in eschewing existing orthodoxies in favour of rethinking and remaking knowledge anew in meaningful co-production with participants and in thinking across the interstices of multiple academic disciplines and traditions.