The harms of hate: challenging Anti-Gypsyism – Professor Zoë James

Who is deemed valuable and who is not in society – and what can we do about it?

Overwhelming evidence has been presented to local and national governments that Gypsies, Travellers and Roma are ill-treated by public services, and that local authorities have also failed to provide long-promised accommodation for them. Despite this marginalisation, the current UK government is again proposing new legislation in the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill 2021 that will further discriminate against those communities.

Professor Zoë James reflects on her extensive expertise on how and why Gypsies, Travellers and Roma experience multiple and complex harms in the UK and Europe, inflicted via state mechanisms and via everyday interpersonal relations.

Zoë has worked with Gypsies, Travellers and Roma, their support organisations and other academics to challenge their exclusion from public life and services. In this lecture, Zoë shows how she has evidenced where they have been placed socially, physically and politically at the margins of society and how this exclusion has been sustained, and the impacts such harms have on these communities.
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Inaugural Professorial Lecture as part of the Public Research Programme.