Asylum, Social Control and Justice (Romani and Traveller Communities)
Course Convenor: Prof Thomas Acton
Course Code: SOCI 1049
This course will examine the complicated relationship between systems of social control and the maintenance of social order within Romani/Gypsy/Traveller communities, and the ways in which state authorities have sought to subject them to the general law of the state. In order to do this it will situate these ethnic communities historically, and seek to deconstruct the traditional problematic of European Romani Studies about the domination of commercial-nomadic economic niches in industrialising Europe by groups related to the Romani ethnic continuum. It will examine the rise of state policies specifically aimed at Gypsy groups, and their Europeanisation after 1783, and their effects upon the internal organisation of Gypsy groups. It will look at the development of "the new Gypsy politics" after 1945, and efforts to create Romani/Gypsy/Traveller political organisations as actors within national and international politics.
Finally it will examine what general lessons may be learned about private lawmaking and restorative justice from internal Romani social control mechanisms. The course will introduce graduates and professionals (such as teachers, social and community workers, police officers and community health practitioners) to the broad sociological, social-anthropological and socio-legal literatures within Romani Studies, and enable them to contrast the situation of Romani/Gypsy/Traveller groups within the industrialised West with those in Eastern Europe and the Third World.