Resisting Extinction Narratives and Sedentist Bias: Exploring hope for nomadic lifeways in urban and rural contexts
Panel 19 / Quinto Convegno Nazionale SIAC “SPERARE / DISPERARE / DESIDERARE”
Matera, 25-27 settembre 2025
Proponenti: Stefania Pontrandolfo (Università di Verona), Ariell Ahearn (University of Oxford)
Abstract
For centuries, state authorities predicted the extinction of nomadic ways of life amongst groups as diverse as the Roma and Sinti in Europe and mobile pastoralists groups in the Middle East, Central Asia and beyond. Early extinction narratives were underpinned by a contradictory mix of melancholy for the exotified figure of the nomad, seen as incompatible with modernity, as well as explicit anti-nomadic policies of forced sedentarisation. Today, the idea that nomadic ways of life are fading away are prevalent in climate change adaptation and securitization discourses, which posit that the lands that mobile pastoralist inhabit will become uninhabitable or too climatically volatile for herders to survive in. Likewise, in Europe development discourses take a more patronising approach by presenting nomadism as an insecure or unsafe way of life. In this panel, we aim to examine how extinction narratives have been resisted by nomadic peoples encompassing both urban and rural livelihoods. How have responses to anti-nomadism enabled forms of resilience and political astuteness amongst nomadic peoples? What does hope look like in this context, where the future projected publicly for this way of life is always predicted to fail by development practitioners and governments? Extinction narratives also raise critical methodological questions. How can we as scholars create spaces for hope through everyday academic practices of teaching, fieldwork, writing and advocacy for communities?
Keywords: Nomdic Peoples, Pastoralists Groups, Roma and Sinti, Extinction Narratives, Sedentist Bias
Lingue accettate: English
Per sottomettere un paper scaricare il seguente format e inviarlo a: stefania.pontrandolfo@univr.it; ariell.ahearn@ouce.ox.ac.uk
To submit a paper download the following format and please send it to: stefania.pontrandolfo@univr.it; ariell.ahearn@ouce.ox.ac.uk
