Misrecognition of Minorities in Europe is a European scale project involving researchers from Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Hungary, the Netherlands, Serbia, and Romania. They are scholars from the following universities: Bielefeld University (Germany), Amsterdam University (The Netherlands), Paris-Nanterre University (France), Eötvös Loränd University (Hungary), St. Andrews University (Scotland), and Novi Sad University (Serbia). The study was approved by the Ethics Committee (FMG) of the University of Amsterdam.
The project has been implemented from 2019 to 2021, and it aims at understanding the social phenomenon by which some people, belonging to certain groups, are denied recognition of a certain identity incumbent to them or are misrecognised or assigned a wrong, stereotypical identity which is a pre-eminent phenomenon experienced on a daily basis by members of minority groups in Europe, e.g. Muslims in Western Europe or Roma in Eastern Europe.
Within this project, between September 2020 and January 2021 the REF Foundation carried out two surveys in which over 800 Romanian citizens belonging to Roma minority groups took part. Moreover, for two weeks, 23 participants kept a personal diary in which they described their relevant experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic. Furthermore, 18 semi-structured individual in-depth interviews were conducted with Roma citizens who had the opportunity to describe in detail how they perceived the social situation generated by the pandemic context triggered by the SARS-CoV-2 virus between March 2019 and the date of the interview.
The project defines the refusal to be recognized or the misrecognition as those situations in which others reject the sense of one’s own identity. These experiences can take many forms, such as refusing to acknowledge someone’s valued identity (e.g., “You are not a true Romanian.”), Imposing a single identity to someone, and excluding his/her other identities (e.g., “You will always be seen as Roma and never as a father, teacher, supporter of a football team, etc.), assigning some traits based on someone’s identity (e.g. “You are Roma, so you are certainly lazy!”), and even ignoring the very existence of the group (e.g. “We don’t have room for you, the Roma, in our political debates!”
The MisMiE project also focuses on the roots of the feeling of non-recognition or misrecognition, the way people experience these (mis)recognitions, and the consequences of their own feelings – especially regarding the relationship between minorities and public authorities. To this end, the project has developed a series of research studies that address these multiple facets of recognition or misrecognition issues.
The results of this research, coordinated by Mr. Claudiu Ivan, holder of a PhD in Sociology, shall be disseminated to the public through an online conference scheduled for April 20, 2021.
