In September 2013, Dagens\nNyheter ran the headline \u201cThe Police Register Thousands of Romanis\u201d. This, of\ncourse, horrified its readers. But how foreign are such lists to the Baltic Sea\nregion? Before the 1950s, state experts and police had often joined in identifying\nand suggesting measures to deal with the “Gypsy race”. In\nScandinavia, enthusiasm for social engineering combined with social prejudices\nto define \u201cGypsies\u201d and tattare as a threat. In the new Baltic states,\nstate-making entailed ethno-nationalist efforts to guard the race\u2019s \u201cquality\nand quantity\u201d against contamination. Throughout the Baltic Sea area,\naccordingly, states asked experts to help identify sig\u00f8jnere, ?ig?ni, and\ntattare; experts\u2019 international networks, national institutions, and sub-state\norganizations (including the police) combined, in their turn, to issue\nrecommendations as to what to do with \u201cthe Gypsy plague\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
These efforts culminated in\nthe early 1940s, when German genocidal policies also reached their apogee. East\nof the Baltic, anti-minority sentiments combined with bitter experiences of\nSoviet occupation to condition responses to German demands for racial\ncleansing. In Scandinavia, meanwhile, both occupied and unoccupied nations\nundertook their own investigations into the “Gypsy problem”. Interest\nin \u201cGypsies\u201d and tattare peaked on both sides of the Baltic in the early 1940s.\nHow can we understand this simultaneous concern? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
In this project, we will\nlook at the persecution of \u201cGypsies\u201d and tattare as a matter of expert knowledge-production.\nOne sub-project will examine Baltic-region international eugenicist and\ncriminologist networks, with attention to the 1940s. Did international\ndiscourses change; how were they reflected in Baltic region countries? The\nother three sub-projects are on actions concerning Gypsy in Latvia, Denmark and\nSweden. There, we are interested in national experts\u2019 relation to both\ninternational Baltic networks, and to the local adjuncts necessary to their\nwork: schools, hospitals, social services, and, above all, the police. Without\nthese local instances, experts would not have been able to find (or act\nagainst) the populations they often defined as a separate \u201crace\u201d. We write,\nthus, of three-tiered knowledge production: international, national, and local.\nThis Foucauldian approach to the production of \u201cGypsies\u201d, combined with our\nstringently comparative focus, will allow new understanding of Baltic-region\nantiziganism during a time of drastic geopolitical change.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"template":"","class_list":["post-632","project","type-project","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n