Trapped Ambitions: The Contradiction of Social Immobility amongst Roma Youth in Hungary
Cecília Kovai, Fanni Mária Puskás, Alexandra Szőke
https://doi.org/10.1080/07256868.2024.2440472
The article focuses on the inner tensions that arise from the dissonance of normative expectations of social advancement and limited structural opportunities. Grounded in Bourdieu’s theory, the authors contend that dispositions are shaped not only by objective structures but also by normative expectations. Due to historically grounded structural racism, people who belong to the Roma ethnicity in Hungary often struggle with the related mental distress, described as ‘divided habitus’. The paper highlights that such tensions are the lived experience of not only those who manage to socially advance, as previous research has thus far shown, but also of those who cannot. Focusing on the struggles of the ‘unsuccessful many’, the paper explores these inner tensions through the case of Rozika, a disadvantaged Roma girl.
