Romani Migration: A Retro-History of the Romanian Roma Presence in France after the Second World War

The seminar proposes to trace the historical context of the Romanian Roma immigration in the Paris region in France based on a bi-situated ethnography in France and Romania. The aim is to show the diversity of Roma’s group identities, regional Romanian settlements, and historical destinies that are hidden behind the univocal image of poor immigrants with whom the Roma are associated in Western Europe. Finally, the seminar will highlight the impact of immigration on the socioeconomic starting positions of each Romani group.

Grégoire Cousin holds his PhD in Public and Comparative Law from the Universities of Tours and Florence. His doctoral research was on the legal status of the migration of Romanian Roma. He is a member of the academic board of Urba-Rom, and between 2013 and 2017, he was a senior field researcher in the French team of the MigRom project at the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme. His research focused on the anthropology of power in and out of the Romani communities in France and Romania. He was MSCA fellow at the University of Verona with a project on marriage and social structure in a Roma community of Tulcea (Romania). Currently, Grégoire is a research fellow at the Fondation Pour la Mémoire de la Shoah (Paris) with the research project on the Roma deportation to Transnistria Governorate during the Second World War.