Dealing with intake and elimination. Roma people and self-care practices at the margins of the city
(2016) Royal Geographical Society Annual International Conference 2016 — Location: London
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- In this paper I explore the complicate relation between vulnerability and autonomy as expressed through the practices of self-care (Orem 1991) in/at/within the margins of the city. Among the possible landscapes of care (Milligan 2003), I am interested in the way the body and the sanitation and water infrastructures interact (Desai McFarlane Graham 2015) in precarious domestic space, and how they affect self-care practices. Relying on my ethnographic works with Roma people living in informal settlements and squats in Turin and Marseille (2013-ongoing), I will therefore focus on the way they assemble the intake and the elimination of water and food, considered here as basic requirements of self-care practices such as eating, drinking, washing. Take toilets for example: as the material dimension of a precarious living entails a lack of drainage system, the corporal-phenomenological relation with excrement is radical, whereas in a “normal” flat the presence of interstices in the walls where this system runs prevents inhabitants to confront with elimination. Somehow, living at the margins is marked by a lack/penury of margins and the relationship between body and bodily wastes is not mediated. At the same time, emergency issues characterising Roma policies both in Italy and France are often legitimated by care and sanity discourses. Fitting in makeshift settlements with chemical toilets while evicting Roma squats because of the lack of water and sanitation, and their unhealthy living conditions, are aspects which coexist in the political routine vis-à-vis of these populations. In cases like this, how is the landscape of self-care combined? Which kind of tactics (de Certeau 1990) do people develop to gain autonomy against public policies? How is the relation between care and power finally articulated?
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Rosa, E. c. (2016). Dealing with intake and elimination. Roma people and self-care practices at the margins of the city. Royal Geographical Society Annual International Conference 2016, London. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/119714