CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2019
| Author | Vajda, Melinda |
|---|---|
| Title | Are We at Home? Roma Migratory Concepts of Home in Canada and in Hungary |
| Summary | How home is made, unmade and remade? This question lies at the heart of my research on home making practices of Roma from Szabolcs-Szatmár-Bereg county, many of whom have migrated repeatedly: from rural to urban areas in Hungary, from Hungary to Canada and back again. Home-making as the focus of the thesis contains many important dimensions- identity, belonging, integration, politics, spatiality and temporality. Interrogating these dimensions, I argue, we can better understand the impacts of migration on home-making and vice versa. My BA thesis was dealing with Roma migration inside Hungary, how Roma people could preserve their cultural identity moving from the countryside to the capital city in the 1980s. My current research continues and expands the interest as it newly sheds light on the migration of Roma people from Hungary to Canada (started from 2008) and then back to Hungary after 2012. The Roma return migrants’ situation in Hungary is an understudied phenomenon, hence my thesis aims to fill this gap. Roma are the biggest minority in Europe facing discrimination in housing, education, health and employment related issues. Therefore, my thesis answers the following questions: How do Roma people as a community living on the margins imagine home? Have Roma persons ever felt themselves at home in Hungary? How do they create a new home in Canada and then in Hungary? How do space and time impact on their sense of home? How does migration impact their identity and belonging? According to my main findings living on the margins affects significantly the Roma people’s sense of home, because many of the informants were claiming that they do not feel themselves at home neither in Hungary, nor in Canada. Creating the material needs of home is easier in Canada because the state gives them financial support, but as they were saying “the roots are in Hungary, in my village where I came from…and it is impossible to find or create the roots in Canada” (Klaudia, 51). |
| Supervisor | Rajaram, Prem Kumar |
| Department | Sociology MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2019/vajda_melinda.pdf |
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