Antigypsyism, legal culture and sentencing in Italy: A dialogue between sociology of law and critical Romani studies

Claudia Mantovan

doi:10.35295/osls.iisl/0000-0000-0000-1300

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Claudia Mantovan Università di Padova https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1482-8936

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https://doi.org/10.35295/osls.iisl/0000-0000-0000-1300

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Legal culture, sentencing, critical Romani studies, antigypsyism, Italy

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This article analyzes the relationship between Roma people and the law by combining two different theoretical approaches, one focusing on legal culture, the other drawing on critical Romani studies. The resulting analytical model supports: 1) the adoption of a multi-level and interpretative approach to examining legal culture, and 2) the focus on the processes of racialization and discrimination implemented by the dominant society, especially within the legal field. The analysis brings to light the mutually-influencing relations between dominant stereotypes about Roma and Sinti people on the one hand, and Italy’s legal culture and sentencing on the other. This topic is examined in relation to the Italian and the wider European historical, political and cultural context, since the way in which legal actors see Roma and Sinti people is strongly influenced by their social and political milieu, and by historically-originated dominant cultural repertoires.

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Claudia Mantovan holds a Ph.D. in Sociology. She is currently fixed-term research assistant at the University of Padua, where she’s also member of the research group SLAN.G - Slanting Gaze on Social Control, Labor, Racism and Migration (http://www.slang-unipd.it). She carries out organizational and didactic activities within the inter-university master’s degree (University of Padua and Bologna) in “Critical Criminology and Social Security”. Her research focuses on the processes of criminalization and racialization of Roma people and immigrants, and their agency and bottom-up engagement in citizenship. In 2018 she obtained the National Scientific Habilitation as Associate Professor in Sociology of Political and Legal Phenomena. Contact details: University of Padua, Department of Philosophy, Sociology, Education and Applied Psychology (FISPPA), via M. Cesarotti 10/12, 35123 Padova, Italy. Email address: claudia.mantovan@unipd.it

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