Counteracting the Schools’ Demon: Local Social Changes and Their Effects on the Participation of Roma Children in School Education

The aim of the article (The empirical material leading to the present chapter results from the research effort “MigRom—The Immigration of Romanian Roma to Western Europe: Causes, effects, and future engagement strategies”, a project funded by the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme under the call “Dealing with diversity and cohesion: the case of the Roma in the European Union” (GA319901). I also used the results and experiences of earlier fieldworks starting with 2000 in Bighal (the name of the localities were changed in order to respect the identities of the people) that were financed through Open Society Institute, Visegrad Funds, CERGE-EI through GDN and WIIW, respectively Inclusion 2007 through PHARE 2004. Earlier version of the article was presented at the GLS Conference in Nicosia (Cyprus) in 2017. The article was finalized in the framework of a visiting research programme at TARKI-POLC receiving funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 730998, “InGRID-2—Integrating Research Infrastructure for European expertise on Inclusive Growth from data to policy”.) is to inquire into the interconnectedness of large number of factors that carry the opportunity and possibility of improving school participation of Roma children in Romania. I argue that the inherent deficiencies of the educational system, starting with the structural constraints and ending with the psycho-social context in which Roma (or minoritized, marginalized, vulnerable) children learn, can be and are challenged by initiatives, strategies or processes that fall out of the immediate range of the strict framework of the educational system. Bourdieu used the Maxwell’s demon as a metaphor to illustrate the reproduction of socio-economic inequalities in the framework of school system. But this ‘demon’ might be challenged with more or less success if we step out and look for possible ‘tools’ to counteract this demon. Two such cases are presented in this chapter. One is a project implemented with and by the local Roma community using external financing and the other one is the participation of the members of the communities in international migration and use of remittances. I will emphasize that independently of the type and amount of the mobilized resources the individuals and/or communities are able to create and proactively make good use of path-departing opportunities through mechanisms of redefining and changing contextual constraints thus improvements can be observed in the school participation of the Roma children (PS. PS. The article was written before the COVID-19 pandemic hit the world. Its effects seems to neutralize the positive impact of the above mentioned processes: the slow steps taken in improving the socio-economic situation of the Roma seems to be stopped; prejudices and ethnic hatred seems to be stronger; access to services for Roma communities get more difficult, including to education: in this context, a further research question is how on-line schooling changed or will change the participation of Roma children?).