Abstract
This paper draws on the experience of two Romani and three non-Romani scholars in knowledge production on the health and social inequalities experienced by European Roma populations. Together, we explore how we might better account for, and work against, the complex web of dynamic oppressions embedded within processes of academic knowledge production. Our aim is to encourage careful scrutiny through which sociologists of health and illness might better recognise our own complicity with oppression and identify concrete actions towards transforming our research practices. Drawing on a well-known domains of racism typology (Annual Review of Public Health, 40, 2019, 105), we use examples from our own work to illustrate three interconnected domains of oppression in which we have found ourselves entangled (structural, cultural and interpersonal). A new conceptual framework is proposed as an aid to understanding the spectrum of different "types" of complicity (voluntary-involuntary, conscious-unconscious) that one might reproduce across all three domains. We conclude by exploring how sociologists of health and illness might promote a more actively anti-racist research agenda, identifying and challenging subtle, hidden and embedded negative ideologies and practices as well as more obviously oppressive ones. We hope these reflections will help revitalise important conversations.
Highlights
Racist assumptions built into our questions and the failure to acknowledge these effects has a continuing effect in naturalizing the acts of oppression, discrimination, murder and state violence against Gypsies, Roma and Travellers in the twenty-first century.Acton and Ryder (2015, page 1)This paper calls for sociologists of health and illness to better account for the political, historical and social contexts that underpin oppression
How might we develop more complete understandings of the determinants of Roma health whilst taking account of our own complicities with Roma oppression in the process of knowledge production? What might this reflexive work tell us about countering wider complicities in the sociology of health and illness? As sociologists, we might appear well placed to produce new understandings that fully embrace the complexity of racially minoritised identity and experience
As demonstrated throughout this paper, sociologists keen to generate new knowledge around the health and social inequalities experienced by racialised minorities such as Roma are inevitably entangled in a complex web of interconnected complicities with oppressions across structural, cultural and interpersonal domains
Summary
Racist assumptions built into our questions and the failure to acknowledge these effects (of earlier racism) has a continuing effect in naturalizing the acts of oppression, discrimination, murder and state violence against Gypsies, Roma and Travellers in the twenty-first century. This paper calls for sociologists of health and illness to better account for the political, historical and social contexts that underpin oppression Whilst those working with racially minoritised or marginalised groups might, on the face of it, encounter some quite obvious dilemmas, we believe everyone should consider how their engagement in research contexts will result in potentially compromising entanglements. In this piece, we take our experiences in knowledge production on the health and social inequalities experienced by European Roma as an example of the complicities that we all face, and explore how we can work with and against these complicities. The challenge now is to transform deeply embedded ways of thinking and practising within academic research processes
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