How do you displace a Gypsy? Bauman Memorial Conversation 2
- Date
- Wednesday 17 June 2026, 16:00-17:15
- Location
- Zoom
The Bauman Institute was delighted to host the second event in our online Bauman Memorial Conversations series, Thinking Displacement, with an intervention by Professor Becky Taylor, esteemed historian of the relationship between the British state and marginalised peoples and places.
The Bauman Memorial Conversations are held in honour of Janina Bauman, whose own writings on displacement, marginality and the lives of those excluded from dominant social orders continue to shape the intellectual orientation of the Institute.
How do you displace a Gypsy? Conventional wisdom has it that 'Gypsies' - or at least 'real Gypsies' - are always on the move: 'here today gone tomorrow'. If this is the case then they cannot be displaced. And yet this is a wilful misreading of the ways in which Gypsies and Travellers mobile lives have always been enmeshed in local and regional economies and in particular places and pieces of land. U
sing Belvedere Marshes - once one of the biggest long-term Gypsy and Traveller communities in England - as a case study, Becky Taylor reflects on the ways in which the local and central state deliberately worked to displace its residents. In the process she raises questions around who is seen as belonging, and the consequences for those who are not. In doing so, the event also resonates closely with Janina Bauman’s reflections on the historical persecution and invisibility of European Roma, whose experiences she saw as offering a distinctive insight into wider processes of exclusion and displacement
sing Belvedere Marshes - once one of the biggest long-term Gypsy and Traveller communities in England - as a case study, Becky Taylor reflects on the ways in which the local and central state deliberately worked to displace its residents. In the process she raises questions around who is seen as belonging, and the consequences for those who are not. In doing so, the event also resonates closely with Janina Bauman’s reflections on the historical persecution and invisibility of European Roma, whose experiences she saw as offering a distinctive insight into wider processes of exclusion and displacementThe talk was accompanied by illustrations by Gerardo D'Ambrosio, taken from their collaborative graphic history project, Anywhere But Here. Becky will be in conversation with longtime fellow of the Bauman Institute, Bryan Cheyette.