Securitarian Healing: Roma Mobility and Health Care in Rome

Abstract

Over the last decade, Roma populations in Europe have been the object of strict securitarian policies. The Rome case is particularly interesting due to the continued shift from securitarian to humanitarian discourses and actions led by local institutions. The specific health care system implemented in the legal and illegal Roma camps was one of the tools used. The ethnographic fieldwork behind this article involved following the daily activities of a mobile medical unit dedicated to Roma camps in Rome and monitoring a health care project led by a nongovernmental organization. This analysis focuses on one particular dimension of precarious forms of Roma citizenship that the health care policies have developed to address Roma issues: the international mobility dynamics relating to health issues, which drive subjects into a forced integration of multiple, incomplete, and fragmentary medical approaches.

Keywords:

• camps
• Italy
• mobility
• Roma
• Rome

Notes

1. http://www.interno.gov.it/mininterno/export/sites/default/it/sezioni/sala_stampa/speciali/Pacchetto_sicurezza/index_2.html.

2. In this article, although I acknowledge the complexity of this category and the different entities composing this group, I use the term ‘Roma’ (Rom, in Italian), as this is the term used by all the actors involved in my field of work, including institutional figures, health care personnel, activists, and citizens (Cossée 2010).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lorenzo Alunni

Lorenzo Alunni obtained a PhD in Anthropology at the Universities of Perugia (Italy) and Paris Ouest (France), in joint direction. In the same year he was assistant researcher at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. He is currently a Fernand Braudel-IFER postdoctoral Fellow at the IRIS-École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), Paris.