Book Talk: The Permanence of Anti-Roma Racism: (Un)uttered Sentences

Join us for an engaging discussion with Margareta Matache, featuring her recently published book The Permanence of Anti-Roma Racism (Un)uttered Sentences. Matache situates anti-Roma racism within national and intra-continental histories and global scholarship, exploring its specific and universal underpinnings and manifestations and its interconnectedness with other systems of oppression. The Permanence of Anti-Roma Racism offers a theoretical perspective on the roots of anti-Roma racism, tracing its genesis in the system of racialized slavery in the principalities of Molvoda and Wallachia and the politics of killings, expulsions, and entry bans across Europe in the late Middle Ages. Furthermore, employing theoretical frameworks of structural oppressions, anti-colonial and decolonial thought, racialization, and intersectionality, this book analyzes how deep historical legacies continue to shape anti-Roma racism as an enduring, structural form of oppression. 

Speakers

Margareta (Magda) Matache is a Lecturer on Social and Behavioral Sciences at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the co-founder and Director of the Roma Program at the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard University.  Matache’s research focuses on the manifestations and impacts of racism and other systems of oppression in different geographical and political contexts. Her research examines the structural and social determinants of health and their nexus with historical contexts and contemporary public policies, with a particular focus on anti-Roma racism.

Beatrice Lindstrom (Respondent/Moderator) is Senior Clinical Instructor and Lecturer on Law in the International Human Rights Clinic at Harvard Law School.  Since 2020, she has led the clinic’s efforts to secure justice and compensation for Romani communities poisoned by lead in UN-managed camps in Kosovo — a case that exemplifies how anti-Roma racism enables rights violations and denial of justice. Together with Kosovo Roma activists, she has co-authored several publications and facilitated policy discussions on the issue. Her work in Kosovo builds her experience litigating and advocating for accountability for gross human rights violations in Haiti, including UN peacekeepers’ 2010 introduction of cholera to the country.

This event is organized by The Human Rights Program at Harvard Law School and co-sponsored by the Program on Law and Society in the Muslim World, Harvard Law School’s Advocates for Human Rights, the Harvard Human Rights Journal, and the Ethnicity, Migration, Rights: The Committee on Ethnicity, Migration, Rights, Faculty of Arts & Sciences at Harvard University.