23/08/2018
The Hugo Valentin Centre warmly welcomes new postdoctoral fellow, Dr. Theresa Johnsson. Her work focuses on questions about class, social, economic and legal inequality between people and how these variables could shape people's lives, c. 1780-1850. A consequence of this is a methodological interest in accessing an often difficult-to-access history of everyday life that also includes poor people.
In her research at the Hugo Valentin Centre, Dr. Johnsson will engage subaltern history with archival sources in order to trace and study the everyday lives of Romani people in mid-Sweden c. 1780-1840. While it is commonly known that the will to control so called “Gypsies” has loomed large in West European legislation since the Middle ages, comparative studies focusing on the social history of Romani people in Europe before the late 19th century are scarce. Employing a biographical, microhistorical methodology, critical questions are posed about the emergence of the modern nationstate, the agency of Romanies, the nature of archives and the methological implications of writing history of groups that have left few egodocuments behind. The empirical focus here lies on three areas of inquiry that are or can be crucial to people’s welfare: the possibility of crossing different kinds of borders legally, the possibility of legal settlement and the possibility of making a legal livelihood. Mini-biographies will be constructed mainly around three women, based on the sporadic, floating glimpses that are left of them in the archives. Drawing from a multitude of sources, combining qualitative and quantitative data, the lives of these women will be used as hubs in order explore the position and experience of Romani people in Sweden as well as the emergence of the modern nationstate. The main aim is twofold: to problematize different historical silences, and to broaden and deepen our understanding of the long history of Romani people in the Nordic countries.
