Stigma sociale e identità nomade: un'analisi sociologica dei processi di esclusione dei rom

This thesis explores three main topics which, as we will highlight at the end of the investigation, represent evocative parts of the same theme. The first section aims to investigate the implicit mechanisms underlying the processes of stigmatization and social exclusion. Using a constructivist approach, we will elucidate the ways in which subjects collectively produce social stigma, that is, the outcome of a judgement of inferiority that disqualifies individual and collective identities and leads to forms of discrimination and social marginalization. Guided mainly by the contributions of Alfred Schutz’s phenomenological sociology and Berger and Luckmann’s sociological constructionism, the paper will focus on the social production of shared meanings and common sense, through which dominant social actors construct the legitimacy of stigmatizing judgments. We continue our discussion by taking on a deconstructionist perspective with the goal of analyzing power relations and discursive practices. These lead to dominated subjectivities based on ethnicity and cultural differentiationism, which contribute to forms of institutionalized racism. In the next section the theoretical considerations of this first section will be directly applied to the context of a concrete case: the ethnic stigma of Roma communities. In the final part of the paper, the theme of nomadism as a human existential condition will be addressed. What will emerge emphatically from these final pages will be the reason for an incipient collective sensitivity, more aware and attentive to the dimension of extended relationality, in which human experience is immersed. Ultimately, the research aims to question two constituent aspects of the human being: closure and, at the same time, openness to the Other.