G Picker
Biographic Data
| ID | 18927 |
|---|---|
| NAME | G Picker |
| GIVEN NAMES | G |
| FAMILY NAME | Picker |
| SIGNATURE | PICKER G |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Glasgow |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5789-9139 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 21 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 80 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 21 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2011 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
The affective politics of planning: Longing for Gadjo-than Rome (1994–2017)
Addressing the rise of “late fascism,” this article places affective politics squarely into the study of urban planning. Focusing on Rome’s municipal plans to house Romani families in segregated camps between 1994 and 2017, I trace the affective registers through which these plans were phrased and publicly presented. The plans unfolded against the backdrop of the longstanding racial coding of European Roma as “nomads,” going from suspicion and ac…
Planning a European Racial City: Dealing (with) Dread in Twenty‐first‐century Berlin
In this article I examine a participatory planning initiative in contemporary Berlin to propose a theoretical reflection on the entanglements between race and urban futures in the German capital. The promoters of the planning initiative aimed to solve the problem of drug dealing in an inner‐city park. Motivated by no economic interests or concerns, they framed the problem they aimed to solve as the long‐time residents’ dread of the figure of ‘the…
The Italian postracial archive
In conversation with recent works on the rise of right-wing populism, racism and crises across Europe and beyond, this article critically examines the ongoing reconfiguration of racism in Italy. By drawing on both quantitative and qualitative analyses, we argue that this reconfiguration is part of the emergent political and cultural reference of postraciality. Accordingly, we organize an archive of Italian postracial racism in two main chronologi…
Anti-gypsyism, racial knowledge and colonial amnesia
This intervention brings together insights from race critical theories and historical sociology to provide a framework for understanding the longstanding racism against Romani people across Europe. It directly draws on Picker's 2017 monograph Racial Cities , and argues that in order to understand the racial segregation of Romani people in Europe, racial knowledge and colonial amnesia should be squarely placed at the core of analytical scrutiny an…
Anti-gitanismo, conocimiento racial y amnesia colonial
Este texto aúna visiones de las teorías críticas sobre la raza y de la sociología histórica para ofrecer un marco que permita comprender el extendido racismo contra el pueblo romaní a través de Europa. El texto se apoya directamente en la monografía Racial Cities (Picker, 2017). Argumenta que, para comprender la segregación racial de los romaníes en Europa, el conocimiento racial y la amnesia colonial han de resituarse en el centro del escrutinio…
Racist morbidities: A conjunctural analysis of the Covid-19 pandemic
This article outlines an argument about the morbid character of racism in the time of COVID-19. Drawing on Antonio Gramsci's famous characterisation of the crisis as an ‘interregnum’ in which various ‘morbid phenomena’ appear, we suggest that one of the main underpinning logics of the current crisis could be thought of in terms of racist morbidities. Framing the article within Stuart Hall's reading of Gramsci and David Theo Goldberg's understandi…
Race and place
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to introduce the special issue on race and place. Design/methodology/approach The approach used by the authors is to combine an overview of sociological debates on place within a framework that makes the case for a relational approach to race, space and place. Findings The overview provides an account of place in sociology, of the relationality of race and place, and the making of race and place in sociologica…
Sovereignty Beyond the State: Exception and Informality in a Western European City
Bridging debates on urban sovereignty and urban informality, this paper argues that relationships between sovereignty and informality may not reside exclusively in the way the sovereign state decides to allow or forbid informality, but also in the way sovereignty is distributed among a range of state and non‐state actors. Drawing upon fieldwork on the early‐2010s management of displaced Romanian Romani families in two emergency camps in the city …
Racial urbanities: Towards a Global Cartography
Introduction to the Special Issue
Social Inclusion/Exclusion
Social exclusion and social inclusion refer to material, symbolic, and existential deprivation (social exclusion) or absence thereof (social inclusion), although no comprehensive theoretical framework encompasses them. In contrast with the notion of poverty, which largely refers to a lack of material resources, social exclusion is more relational and multidimensional. Its origins are in the French 1960s social Catholicism and 1970s French policy …
Racial Cities: Governance and the Segregation of Romani People in Urban Europe
Going beyond race-blind approaches to spatial segregation in Europe, Racial Cities argues that race is the logic through which stigmatized and segregated "Gypsy urban areas" have emerged and persisted after World War II. Building on nearly a decade of ethnographic and historical research in Romania, Italy, France and the UK, Giovanni Picker casts a series of case studies into the historical framework of circulations and borrowings between colony …
Rethinking Ethnographic Comparison: Two Cities, Five Years, One Ethnographer
In this article I show that the ethnographer can be a heuristic source of comparison. I reflexively discuss the ways in which I learnt from the problems behind my comparative ethnography of everyday representations of Roma in both a Romanian and an Italian city. As a priori detecting a homogeneous group called Roma in Europe can be problematic, my comparison lacked the necessary condition of similarity between the two contexts. Once I came back f…
Urban informality and confinement: Toward a relational framework
In the 21st century, a growing number of people live 'informal' lives within fissures between legality and informality. Concomitantly, power relations are increasingly expressed through devices of confinement. While urban informality and confinement are on the rise often occurring simultaneously, scholars have so far studied them separately. By contrast, this article proposes a new framework for analysing urban informality and confinement relatio…
Colonial refractions: The ‘Gypsy camp’ as a spatio-racial political technology
Camps for civilians first appeared in the colonies. Largely drawing on the literature on colonialism and race, this article conceptualizes the ‘Gypsy camp' in Western European cities as a spatio-racial political technology. We first discuss the shift, starting with decolonization, from colonial to metropolitan technologies of the governance of social heterogeneity. We then relate this broad historical framing to the ideas and ideologies that sinc…
Durable camps: The state, the urban, the everyday
No abstract available
Abnormalising minorities. The state and expert knowledge addressing the Roma in Italy
This article expands the research on abnormalisation and the construction of social deviance of minorities. It focuses on the relationships between state practices, policies and expert knowledge addressing the Roma in Italy; it does so by first contextualising recent ethnographic findings on Turin authorities’ social inclusion practices addressing Roma within the history of national and regional policies for Roma; it then contextualises those pol…
That neighbourhood is an ethnic bomb!’ The emergence of an urban governance apparatus in Western Europe
In this article I investigate ethnographically the urban governance of Rancitelli, a marginalized neighbourhood in Pescara, Southern Italy; in the neighbourhood the majority of the members of the local unrecognized minority of Italian Roma reside. Although privately recognizing social problems concerning the neighbourhood and its residents, who live in marginal social conditions, local authorities are silent vis-à-vis these issues. Drawing on lon…
Ţiganu-i ţigan: Verbal Icons and Urban Marginality in a Post-Socialist European City
Social science studies have not often looked at the links between broad dynamics of social closure and everyday local idioms of difference in post-socialist Europe. In this article I give a theoretical and empirical contribution to research on the links between “cultural intimacy” and urban marginality in times of massive neoliberal restructuring in the region. Drawing on fieldwork in Cluj-Napoca (Romania) I ethnographically investigate the every…
Tra inclusione ed esclusione. Una storia sociale dell'educazione dei rom e dei sinti in Italia
Luca Bravi (2009) Tra inclusione ed esclusione. Una storia sociale dell’educazione dei rom e dei sinti in Italia (Milan: Edizioni Unicopli), 7 – 173 pp., ISBN 9788840013718,€28,00, soft cover.
Welcome ‘in’. Left-wing Tuscany and Romani migrants (1987–2007)
Although the Italian left was one of the largest popular movements for social change in Western Europe, at the end of the 1980s the Tuscan left-wing regional council imposed the construction of fenced camps for Romani immigrants supposedly in order to give Roma the possibility of developing their own traditional habits. By contextualizing the local political context within the post-1989 changes of left-wing politics vis-à-vis migrants in Italy, t…
Policy Worlds: Anthropology and the Analysis of Contemporary Power
Chris Shore, Susan Wright and Davide Però (eds), Policy Worlds: Anthropology and the Analysis of Contemporary Power, New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2011 (EASA series), vi+343 pp., £55 (hard
Durable camps: The state, the urban, the everyday
No abstract available
Colonial refractions: The ‘Gypsy camp’ as a spatio-racial political technology
Camps for civilians first appeared in the colonies. Largely drawing on the literature on colonialism and race, this article conceptualizes the ‘Gypsy camp' in Western European cities as a spatio-racial political technology. We first discuss the shift, starting with decolonization, from colonial to metropolitan technologies of the governance of social heterogeneity. We then relate this broad historical framing to the ideas and ideologies that sinc…
Urban informality and confinement: Toward a relational framework
In the 21st century, a growing number of people live 'informal' lives within fissures between legality and informality. Concomitantly, power relations are increasingly expressed through devices of confinement. While urban informality and confinement are on the rise often occurring simultaneously, scholars have so far studied them separately. By contrast, this article proposes a new framework for analysing urban informality and confinement relatio…
Sovereignty Beyond the State: Exception and Informality in a Western European City
Bridging debates on urban sovereignty and urban informality, this paper argues that relationships between sovereignty and informality may not reside exclusively in the way the sovereign state decides to allow or forbid informality, but also in the way sovereignty is distributed among a range of state and non‐state actors. Drawing upon fieldwork on the early‐2010s management of displaced Romanian Romani families in two emergency camps in the city …
Racist morbidities: A conjunctural analysis of the Covid-19 pandemic
This article outlines an argument about the morbid character of racism in the time of COVID-19. Drawing on Antonio Gramsci's famous characterisation of the crisis as an ‘interregnum’ in which various ‘morbid phenomena’ appear, we suggest that one of the main underpinning logics of the current crisis could be thought of in terms of racist morbidities. Framing the article within Stuart Hall's reading of Gramsci and David Theo Goldberg's understandi…
Racial urbanities: Towards a Global Cartography
Introduction to the Special Issue
That neighbourhood is an ethnic bomb!’ The emergence of an urban governance apparatus in Western Europe
In this article I investigate ethnographically the urban governance of Rancitelli, a marginalized neighbourhood in Pescara, Southern Italy; in the neighbourhood the majority of the members of the local unrecognized minority of Italian Roma reside. Although privately recognizing social problems concerning the neighbourhood and its residents, who live in marginal social conditions, local authorities are silent vis-à-vis these issues. Drawing on lon…
Ţiganu-i ţigan: Verbal Icons and Urban Marginality in a Post-Socialist European City
Social science studies have not often looked at the links between broad dynamics of social closure and everyday local idioms of difference in post-socialist Europe. In this article I give a theoretical and empirical contribution to research on the links between “cultural intimacy” and urban marginality in times of massive neoliberal restructuring in the region. Drawing on fieldwork in Cluj-Napoca (Romania) I ethnographically investigate the every…
Rethinking Ethnographic Comparison: Two Cities, Five Years, One Ethnographer
In this article I show that the ethnographer can be a heuristic source of comparison. I reflexively discuss the ways in which I learnt from the problems behind my comparative ethnography of everyday representations of Roma in both a Romanian and an Italian city. As a priori detecting a homogeneous group called Roma in Europe can be problematic, my comparison lacked the necessary condition of similarity between the two contexts. Once I came back f…
Race and place
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to introduce the special issue on race and place. Design/methodology/approach The approach used by the authors is to combine an overview of sociological debates on place within a framework that makes the case for a relational approach to race, space and place. Findings The overview provides an account of place in sociology, of the relationality of race and place, and the making of race and place in sociologica…
Tra inclusione ed esclusione. Una storia sociale dell'educazione dei rom e dei sinti in Italia
Luca Bravi (2009) Tra inclusione ed esclusione. Una storia sociale dell’educazione dei rom e dei sinti in Italia (Milan: Edizioni Unicopli), 7 – 173 pp., ISBN 9788840013718,€28,00, soft cover.
Welcome ‘in’. Left-wing Tuscany and Romani migrants (1987–2007)
Although the Italian left was one of the largest popular movements for social change in Western Europe, at the end of the 1980s the Tuscan left-wing regional council imposed the construction of fenced camps for Romani immigrants supposedly in order to give Roma the possibility of developing their own traditional habits. By contextualizing the local political context within the post-1989 changes of left-wing politics vis-à-vis migrants in Italy, t…
Policy Worlds: Anthropology and the Analysis of Contemporary Power
Chris Shore, Susan Wright and Davide Però (eds), Policy Worlds: Anthropology and the Analysis of Contemporary Power, New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2011 (EASA series), vi+343 pp., £55 (hard
That neighbourhood is an ethnic bomb!’ The emergence of an urban governance apparatus in Western Europe
In this article I investigate ethnographically the urban governance of Rancitelli, a marginalized neighbourhood in Pescara, Southern Italy; in the neighbourhood the majority of the members of the local unrecognized minority of Italian Roma reside. Although privately recognizing social problems concerning the neighbourhood and its residents, who live in marginal social conditions, local authorities are silent vis-à-vis these issues. Drawing on lon…
Ţiganu-i ţigan: Verbal Icons and Urban Marginality in a Post-Socialist European City
Social science studies have not often looked at the links between broad dynamics of social closure and everyday local idioms of difference in post-socialist Europe. In this article I give a theoretical and empirical contribution to research on the links between “cultural intimacy” and urban marginality in times of massive neoliberal restructuring in the region. Drawing on fieldwork in Cluj-Napoca (Romania) I ethnographically investigate the every…
Abnormalising minorities. The state and expert knowledge addressing the Roma in Italy
This article expands the research on abnormalisation and the construction of social deviance of minorities. It focuses on the relationships between state practices, policies and expert knowledge addressing the Roma in Italy; it does so by first contextualising recent ethnographic findings on Turin authorities’ social inclusion practices addressing Roma within the history of national and regional policies for Roma; it then contextualises those pol…
Colonial refractions: The ‘Gypsy camp’ as a spatio-racial political technology
Camps for civilians first appeared in the colonies. Largely drawing on the literature on colonialism and race, this article conceptualizes the ‘Gypsy camp' in Western European cities as a spatio-racial political technology. We first discuss the shift, starting with decolonization, from colonial to metropolitan technologies of the governance of social heterogeneity. We then relate this broad historical framing to the ideas and ideologies that sinc…
Durable camps: The state, the urban, the everyday
No abstract available
Social Inclusion/Exclusion
Social exclusion and social inclusion refer to material, symbolic, and existential deprivation (social exclusion) or absence thereof (social inclusion), although no comprehensive theoretical framework encompasses them. In contrast with the notion of poverty, which largely refers to a lack of material resources, social exclusion is more relational and multidimensional. Its origins are in the French 1960s social Catholicism and 1970s French policy …
Racial Cities: Governance and the Segregation of Romani People in Urban Europe
Going beyond race-blind approaches to spatial segregation in Europe, Racial Cities argues that race is the logic through which stigmatized and segregated "Gypsy urban areas" have emerged and persisted after World War II. Building on nearly a decade of ethnographic and historical research in Romania, Italy, France and the UK, Giovanni Picker casts a series of case studies into the historical framework of circulations and borrowings between colony …
Rethinking Ethnographic Comparison: Two Cities, Five Years, One Ethnographer
In this article I show that the ethnographer can be a heuristic source of comparison. I reflexively discuss the ways in which I learnt from the problems behind my comparative ethnography of everyday representations of Roma in both a Romanian and an Italian city. As a priori detecting a homogeneous group called Roma in Europe can be problematic, my comparison lacked the necessary condition of similarity between the two contexts. Once I came back f…
Urban informality and confinement: Toward a relational framework
In the 21st century, a growing number of people live 'informal' lives within fissures between legality and informality. Concomitantly, power relations are increasingly expressed through devices of confinement. While urban informality and confinement are on the rise often occurring simultaneously, scholars have so far studied them separately. By contrast, this article proposes a new framework for analysing urban informality and confinement relatio…
Race and place
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to introduce the special issue on race and place. Design/methodology/approach The approach used by the authors is to combine an overview of sociological debates on place within a framework that makes the case for a relational approach to race, space and place. Findings The overview provides an account of place in sociology, of the relationality of race and place, and the making of race and place in sociologica…
Sovereignty Beyond the State: Exception and Informality in a Western European City
Bridging debates on urban sovereignty and urban informality, this paper argues that relationships between sovereignty and informality may not reside exclusively in the way the sovereign state decides to allow or forbid informality, but also in the way sovereignty is distributed among a range of state and non‐state actors. Drawing upon fieldwork on the early‐2010s management of displaced Romanian Romani families in two emergency camps in the city …
Racial urbanities: Towards a Global Cartography
Introduction to the Special Issue
Anti-gypsyism, racial knowledge and colonial amnesia
This intervention brings together insights from race critical theories and historical sociology to provide a framework for understanding the longstanding racism against Romani people across Europe. It directly draws on Picker's 2017 monograph Racial Cities , and argues that in order to understand the racial segregation of Romani people in Europe, racial knowledge and colonial amnesia should be squarely placed at the core of analytical scrutiny an…
Anti-gitanismo, conocimiento racial y amnesia colonial
Este texto aúna visiones de las teorías críticas sobre la raza y de la sociología histórica para ofrecer un marco que permita comprender el extendido racismo contra el pueblo romaní a través de Europa. El texto se apoya directamente en la monografía Racial Cities (Picker, 2017). Argumenta que, para comprender la segregación racial de los romaníes en Europa, el conocimiento racial y la amnesia colonial han de resituarse en el centro del escrutinio…
Racist morbidities: A conjunctural analysis of the Covid-19 pandemic
This article outlines an argument about the morbid character of racism in the time of COVID-19. Drawing on Antonio Gramsci's famous characterisation of the crisis as an ‘interregnum’ in which various ‘morbid phenomena’ appear, we suggest that one of the main underpinning logics of the current crisis could be thought of in terms of racist morbidities. Framing the article within Stuart Hall's reading of Gramsci and David Theo Goldberg's understandi…
The Italian postracial archive
In conversation with recent works on the rise of right-wing populism, racism and crises across Europe and beyond, this article critically examines the ongoing reconfiguration of racism in Italy. By drawing on both quantitative and qualitative analyses, we argue that this reconfiguration is part of the emergent political and cultural reference of postraciality. Accordingly, we organize an archive of Italian postracial racism in two main chronologi…
Planning a European Racial City: Dealing (with) Dread in Twenty‐first‐century Berlin
In this article I examine a participatory planning initiative in contemporary Berlin to propose a theoretical reflection on the entanglements between race and urban futures in the German capital. The promoters of the planning initiative aimed to solve the problem of drug dealing in an inner‐city park. Motivated by no economic interests or concerns, they framed the problem they aimed to solve as the long‐time residents’ dread of the figure of ‘the…
The affective politics of planning: Longing for Gadjo-than Rome (1994–2017)
Addressing the rise of “late fascism,” this article places affective politics squarely into the study of urban planning. Focusing on Rome’s municipal plans to house Romani families in segregated camps between 1994 and 2017, I trace the affective registers through which these plans were phrased and publicly presented. The plans unfolded against the backdrop of the longstanding racial coding of European Roma as “nomads,” going from suspicion and ac…
Sociology (19 works) · Political science (13 works) · Law (11 works) · Romani and Gypsy Studies (9 works) · Politics (8 works) · Anthropology (7 works) · Gender Studies (6 works) · Political economy (6 works) · Geography (5 works) · Art (4 works)