From (in)securitisation to conviviality: the reconciliatory potential of participatory ethnography

1 Introduction

This paper takes as a starting point the concepts of (in)securitisation and conviviality, arguing that there is much to be gained from the simultaneous application of these theoretical tools. It uses the two concepts to analyse extracts from workshop conversations recorded during a series of participatory ethnographic workshops. The workshops, which included university participants as well as Hungarian monolingual and Romani-Hungarian bilingual citizens of a small town in Hungary, focused on difficulties of Roma and non-Roma relations, and citizens’ everyday linguistic practices and ideologies.

Originally developed as a term in International Relations, securitisation (Buzan et al. 1998; Wæver 1989) refers to a speech act by which an actor associated with a power centre, typically a state, reframes everyday events based on the notions of exceptionalism, urgency and survival. In a broader sense, securitization refers to (political) actions whose aim is to achieve security. In sociolinguistic research, securitisation is discussed mainly in relation to governmentality and border crossing (Khan 2017, 2022; Yilmaz 2021). Rampton and Charalambous (2020, see also Charalambous et al. 2015) apply securitisation in a more expansive sense: they suggest that through practices and discourses of (in)securitisation it is possible to investigate the attitudes and events that make speakers feel safe or threatened in certain situations, and the ways in which speakers manage boundaries between groups discursively constructed as threatening and threatened.

Rampton et al. (2022a) have identified two strands in the ways of working against (in)securitisation. The first one of these focuses on the ways in which individuals counter (in)securitisation in everyday practices, e.g. how activists develop “communicative practices and imaginings of language to promote projects of counter-securitisation” (15, emphasis in the original) in Rio’s favelas. The second one relates to the de-securitisation of discourses, exemplified by the ways in which speakers of Greek negotiate their past ideologies and discourses concerning Turkish speakers and Turkish language learning in a softening political environment in Cypriot schools. In this paper, it is suggested that conviviality is a discursive practice through which individuals work against (in)securitisation. It picks up the concept of conviviality in the context of multilingual interaction for interethnic understanding (Gilroy 2004) and as a special local ideology (Rampton 2015). The analysis starts from the assumption that convivial capabilities are individual behavioural and discursive strategies, motivated by psychological factors. Translanguaging is a major feature in racialised bilinguals’ discursive strategies. Therefore, the analysis that follows investigates whether, and how, the promotion of translingual ways of speaking can contribute to increasing conviviality in an environment marked by racial hierarchy and monolingualism which is a characteristic feature of those positioned higher in this hierarchy.

The paper applies the concepts of (in)securitisation and conviviality to the investigation of the relationships between Hungarian monolingual speakers and bilingual Roma in Tiszavasvári, a small town in Hungary. The Roma live scattered in Europe, are marginalised everywhere, and speak in many ways. In Hungary, according to estimates, Roma people make up 5–10 % of the population of 10 million. Many of them live in segregated settlements, have limited access to education and health services, and are victims of everyday racism. Some are monolingual Hungarian, others are bilingual, speaking Romani (a language of millions in Europe) or Boyash (a local Eastern-Romance-based language of a few tens of thousands in Hungary, Serbia, and Romania) alongside Hungarian. In Tiszavasvári, about 20 % of the 12,000 inhabitants are Romani-Hungarian bilingual Roma and a further 10 % consider themselves Hungarian monolingual Roma. Bilinguals are at the bottom of racial hierarchy (cf. Spears 2020) in local society. However, discourses of racialisation also affect monolingual Roma, as the basis of these discourses is not necessarily and exclusively Romani-Hungarian bilingualism. Being registered as a Roma can be based on racial categorisation, social situation, participation in the labour market, and family history. I consider (in)securitisation, on the one hand, as a tool to unveil the network of linguistic, racial, and social hierarchies. On the other hand, from a raciolinguistic perspective, which view[s] “race through the lens of language and language through the lens of race” (Alim et al. 2021: 2), (in)securitisation helps to understand how ethnoracial identities are reflected in language and how language is constitutive in the construction of ethnoracial hierarchies.

In 2022, a research group consisting of researchers and student researchers, and led by the present author, invited local monolingual Hungarian and Romani-Hungarian bilingual citizens to take part in research activities. These consisted of workshops lasting 120 min a day which were organised for a total of seven days between July and September. These workshops were preceded by several years of linguistic ethnographic research at the site, leading to a programme to introduce translanguaging as a pedagogical stance into the local school attended by bilingual Roma children (Heltai and Tarsoly 2023). The aim of the workshops discussed here was threefold: first, to start building a community of researchers, committed to improving the recognition of Romani and translanguaging as an everyday practice, thereby exploring its potential as a political act; second, to foster the relations between Roma and non-Roma in the city; third, to undertake preparatory work for the development of an online learning package on participatory research to be used in the higher education curriculum. Participatory research, a developing approach in sociolinguistics (Bodó et al. 2022), involves all stakeholders in each phase of the research activities. In our project, local participants, open to engaging in dialogue with each other and the researchers, were invited through contacts we knew from our previous research activities.

After gradually getting to know each other, participants analysed conflicts and outlined possibilities of conviviality between local residents. Despite reflexive activities carried out in the workshops, local participants generally tended to stay in the social roles to which they are assigned by local reality, in which strong divisions in both space and social interaction persist between Hungarian monolinguals and bilingual Roma. Occasionally, however, local participants reported positive sentiments about their past experience concerning the other group. This paper argues that participatory ethnography, involving local people, offers a suitable approach to assessing and addressing the crippling practices of (in)securitisation and the available alternatives. Thus, participatory ethnography can contribute to creating an increasingly convivial local life. I first discuss the ways in which sociolinguistic approaches to securitisation and conviviality can be used to capture complex linguistic, social, and ethnoracial interdependencies and the role of individual strategies, which are present simultaneously. Second, I describe the research site, the workshops, and the participants. The third, analytical part, applies the method of Moment Analysis (Li 2011, 2022) to extracts from workshop conversations in order to show how acts of (in)securitisation are present in the locality, interwoven with aspirations to conviviality, which counter and occasionally even overwrite (in)securitisation.

2 (In)securitisation and conviviality

Securitisation is a political science concept (Buzan et al. 1998; Wæver 1989), developed in the field of international relations. It is based on speech acts in which speakers interpret reality using notions such as exceptionalism, urgency and survival, with the consequence that the politics of security becomes paramount and supersedes all other interpretations of reality (Gad and Petersen 2011: 315). Theorists of the original concept identified members of nation-state elites as actors. Since its inception, the concept has undergone various revisions and new approaches to its theoretical elucidation have emerged (Stritzel 2014). According to one of the critical revisions of the concept, the act of securitisation can be understood in local terms, focussing on individual life histories (Bigo 2014). This strand opened up the concept for sociolinguistic interpretations.

Khan, identifying language as both the object and the medium of interventions aimed at securitisation (2017), calls for further clarification on how securitisation influences governance decisions on migration, border crossing and language testing (2022). In a similar vein, Yilmaz (2021) seeks to understand how securitisation, alongside care, determines the behaviour of humanitarian actors in and around a refugee camp. Further applicability of the concept is explored in a series of dialogically written papers introduced by Rampton and Charalambous (2020). They emphasise that acts of securitisation can be identified in everyday discourses which no longer affect the entire population of states but smaller and more variably defined groups of people. Building on Bigo and McCluskey (2018: 126), they pinpoint the importance of the bracketed (in)securitization, underlying the consubstantiality and complementarity of securitization and insecuritization. In a further response in the series of papers, Levon (2020) interrogates the factors which influence the movements and practices of individuals in the socio-political space. It is at this point that the concept of conviviality may be usefully combined with (in)securitisation to investigate whether psychological factors can be revealed through its application. The point is that individuals’ efforts to counter-securitise local realities are driven by personal ideologies, such as a conviction of anti-racism, human rights beliefs or, for example, neighbourly love, which can be captured trough the concept of conviviality.

The concept of conviviality was introduced by Illich (1973) in search for tools of human independence in over-technologised modernity. The concept was given a different focus by Gilroy (2004). He traces the ways in which convivial culture in multilingual metropolitan environments of post-imperial Britain is a chance to overcome ethnic absolutisms and undo race thinking. Gilroy interprets conviviality as “the processes of cohabitation and interaction that have made multiculture an ordinary feature of social life”, particularly in urban areas (2004: xi).

A decade later, Wise and Noble reported that conviviality “is (almost) everywhere” (2016: 423) in intercultural and urban studies research – along with terms as cosmopolitanism or global citizenship (Tarsoly and Calic 2022). In this body of research, conviviality is celebrated and became strongly associated with the concept of superdiversity (Vertovec 2007). An important critical insight is provided by Back and Sinha (2016), who contrast Vertovec’s superdiversity with the central idea in Goodhart’s book, The British Dream, (2013) which talks about the melancholy and nostalgia experienced by the “White Heritage” population of a London suburb over cultural loss of “their own” English heritage. Back and Sinha conclude that although Goodhart and Vertovec’ arguments go in completely different directions, they both “minimise the significance of racism in understanding contemporary multiculture” (2016: 520). Similarly, Noronha (2022) calls for a return to the Gilroyian foundations arguing that the main theoretical potential of conviviality lies not in its application as a descriptive tool to capture features of lived multiculture, superdiverse spaces and interactions, but in its anti-racist and humanistic aspirations, stemming from the realisation that conviviality is significant precisely because “it plays out in the context of racism, ultra-nationalism, perpetual war, widening social inequality and deepening social insecurity” (163).

Noronha’s understanding of conviviality points to the inseparability of conviviality and (in)security in multilingual social contexts. This is reflected in the sociolinguistic development of the concept of conviviality from the outset. Williams and Stroud evaluate linguistic citizenship, “a more equitable speaker presence in the official wider sphere of the public realm” (2013: 293), as a tool to grasp convivial linguistic practices. They underline that conviviality is not only used to describe peaceful cohabitation, but is “the outcome of tense interactions and negotiated difference” (291). Blommaert (2013) also emphasises that conviviality is not a ruling social condition, but appears alongside sharp contrasts, social inequalities and tensions. Rampton (2015) states that small talk is not necessarily convivial, but often an arena for ambiguous, threatening, and disconcerting language practices. In his view, conviviality is rather a “particular local ideology” (2015: 87), emerging at points where people are taken outside their everyday comfort zone.

These contradictions concerning the concept of conviviality are present in recent sociolinguistic research, too. Cook (2022), exploring convivial linguistic practices in a small town in the United Arab Emirates, notes that such practices benefit to some extent everyone. However, he also points out that for the most vulnerable, these practices are often not by choice but by necessity. He concludes, while stressing the complexity of social relations, that the overemphasising of both happy coexistence and the workings of power relations is to be avoided (23). Research by Márquez Reiter and Patiño-Santos (2021) among Spanish-speaking Latin Americans in the London-based diaspora draws attention, in a similar way, to the fact that although discourses based on convivial language practices are a source of strength for participants, behind them lie structural tensions of cohabitation.

What follows from the above is that the concept of (in)securitisation can be used to grasp racism, widening social inequality and relations of superiority and subordination that interweave social life at the macro, mezzo, and micro levels. Following Rampton et al. (2022a) in their approach focussing on how individuals work against dominant narratives, this article argues that attention to convivial practices includes a recognition of the ideologies, motivations and practices characterising individuals in their attempts to turn towards each other. Therefore, the analysis that follows applies the two concepts jointly. It focuses on ways in which acts of (in)securitisation determine workshop participants’ communication, while pinpointing the ideological considerations and linguistic practices, which participants employ in order to create a convivial atmosphere, and which can alter the reality shaped by (in)securitisation.

3 Roma and Romani in Tiszavasvári

The usual basis for thinking about ethnic relations in Europe is based on demarcating ethnic groups which are more or less clearly distinguishable from each other. Brubaker calls this groupism (2004). Its ideological foundations are essentially the same as those which account for the separation of languages: the dominance of thinking in terms of nation-state (Makoni and Pennycook 2006). Representatives of Roma identity politics (e.g. Marushiakova and Popov 2001, 2021) often follow this train of thought, identifying different groups and subgroups within the construed ethnic unity of the Roma. However, anthropological approaches highlight the nationalist roots and the contradictory nature of these policies (Law and Kováts 2018) and warn that the Roma do not fit into categories based on groupism (Stewart 2013). Tremlett (2014), seeking a common ground between the ethnic and socio-economic approaches, stresses that the concept of superdiversity “allows a direction in Romani studies that moves beyond a fixed or limiting notion of ‘ethnicity’” (844).

In Hungary, it is widespread in Romani studies to distinguish between mostly monolingual Hungarian Roma and Romani-Hungarian bilingual Vlach Roma (alongside the third “group” of the Boyash [Erdős 1959, Kemény 2005]). The reasons for this distinction are rooted in histories of migration. The town of Tiszavasvári, whose current population is approximately 12,000, is located in an economically deprived region of Hungary and it was created during the socialist industrialisation of the 1950s, with the merger of two adjacent villages. Hungarian-monolingual Roma lived on the edge of one village, while bilingual families were settled in the other village. Today, there is still a sharp divide between the slightly smaller monolingual Roma community of around 1,000 and the larger bilingual Roma community of over 2,000 who live in separate areas within the city.

The precursor to the research project that started in 2022 is linguistic ethnographic research we initiated in the bilingual Roma community in 2016. According to our findings, the language practices of local bilingual Roma are primarily based on Romani, with young children learning Romani first in their home. According to Romani speakers’ own assessment in Tiszavasvári, their Romani is not “pure” because it contains linguistic resources that are typically perceived as “being like Hungarian” (Heltai 2023: 4–5). The school attended by the children of the bilingual Roma is avoided by Hungarian and monolingual Roma families. Despite the fact that most students are bilingual, the school is part of the monolingual Hungarian school system. This is not an exceptional case for bilingual Roma children. Romani is not a language of instruction anywhere in Europe, which is also a consequence of the controversies surrounding its standardisation. According to European policies, the standardisation of a language is regarded as a precondition for its use in education. However, standardisation is contradictory in the absence of a nation-state-like entity, since the social success of the speakers is not related to a Romani standard, but the respective national languages (Busch 2012). In these circumstances, speakers are not interested in mastering standard forms but they often devalue their own linguistic practices because of the spread of standard ideologies (Abercrombie 2018). As Rampton et al. (2022a: 4) point out, standardization and (in)securitization are in many ways intertwined.

After having studied the language practices of local Roma and considering the above pitfalls of standardisation, the research group developed in the bilingual children’s school a language pedagogical programme based on translanguaging. This programme was undertaken in collaboration with local monolingual Hungarian teachers and Roma parents. Participants introduced local Romani into school without attempting to standardise it and made students’ home language practices part of everyday school activities (Heltai and Tarsoly 2023). When Hungarian-monolingual teachers became more open to Romani, children started speaking Romani more willingly and confidently, and parents’ anxieties about the presence of Romani in school were levelled with the potential benefits.

These gradual changes had little impact on relations outside school, however. If there are transformative processes, members of the research team are not aware of them. The town has been in the national press in recent decades because of ethnic tensions. The first one of these broke out in 1997 and it initiated in the predecessor of the school where our research is based, which was then attended by children of staff members of the local pharmaceutical factory (which has since closed). At that time, Roma children studied in a separate building on the school’s grounds. Years of this practice finally came to an end when it became a national scandal that Roma children were segregated at a school ceremony, too. Segregation of Roma children was then abolished but non-Roma families started abandoning the school soon. In the early 2010s, there was a national outcry when the far-right mayor of the city, elected for two terms, tasked a paramilitary organisation with patrolling and policing the bilingual Roma’s settlement. The coexistence of Roma (especially the bilingual community) and non-Roma is also fraught with tensions in everyday life. Both geographically and socially, the railway line that runs along the outskirts of the city forms a border. When bilinguals cross it, acts of (in)securitisation prevent them from feeling liberated: they lack a sense of belonging to that side of the city which is across the line, towards the centre. This sense of alienation and racial exclusion only intensifies because of the difficulties they face when they decide to be part of the side towards the centre and buy a house outside their area, etc.

The transformative power of the translanguaging project and these social tensions have simultaneously shaped local conditions. Applying perspectives based on translanguaging or heteroglossia to the institutionalised frameworks of European societies also proved controversial in other contexts, especially when these projects sought to go beyond micro-level activities. Smith et al. (2020), working on a translanguaging project with Roma families in Western Europe, highlighted the tension between pedagogical translanguaging and the endevours of Roma advocacy movements. Bodó and Fazakas (2023) discuss a Hungarian language revitalisation programme among the Romanian-Hungarian bilingual Csángós in Moldavia, Romania. They show that through the intervention of the programme’s teachers, the students’ voice is institutionalised and transformed according to the expectations of the supporters from Hungary, resulting in the loss of the Csángós’ real voices. García-Sanches (2020) points out how teachers working in a Spanish school with immigrant Roma and majority Spanish children in lessons specifically designed to promote tolerance, invalidate, even unintentionally, the effects of a project intended to be transformative. Rampton et al. (2022b) also point out that the entextualisation of radical postmodernist projects “often results in messages that simplify and partly compromise the original intention” (64).

After a period of data collection among and about the non-Roma residents of Tiszavasvári, the research group focused on participatory activities with both Roma and non-Roma citizens, believing that the inclusion of non-Roma participants could help to extend the scope of our activities beyond the Roma community. In addition to collecting data online (local newspaper and television), 20 half-hour to one-hour discussions were recorded with partners in various public roles in the city (heads of institutions, entrepreneurs, civil activists). These activities prepared the ground for the seven 120-min ethnographic workshops that provide the data for the analysis that follows. What makes it possible to define these workshop activities as ethnographic work is that they involved the study of local linguistic practices in a contextualised way. While non-local participants brought to the discussion a sociolinguistic point of view, local citizens expanded the scope of the discussion with a broader perspective which involved examining their lives and personal relationships more generally (Schubotz 2020).

The workshops involved six bilingual Roma and six monolingual non-Roma women. The Roma women are between the ages 30 and 60 and they live in the segregated area with only Roma neighbours, have only a few years of primary education and limited participation in the labour market, working in public employment schemes or as day labourers. They are all mothers, some of them with unusually large number of children from the perspective of non-Roma local participants. Gender roles among the local Roma dictated that men should be absent from the workshops, as issues such as linguistic practices and ideologies, memory and cultural heritage, etc. are more easily associated with women’s role; thus, women were more persistent in research activities. The invited Roma women were less active in literacy-related activities before the start of our programmes. However, in recent years, they translated and wrote in collaboration with other members of the research group a Romani storybook and co-authored some of the chapters of an academic volume summarising the results of the translanguaging project (Heltai and Tarsoly 2023). Through personal contacts, we also invited six local non-Roma women (between ages 40 and 60) who agreed to participate in the collaborative work in the tense circumstances outlined above. Fearing that in the presence of local Hungarian men, partly due to pressure at home, Roma women would refuse to participate or be less confident in talking about their feelings and problems; so, we insisted on inviting only women. All of the Hungarian monolingual women are respected members of the local community. Two of them work in family businesses. The others are retired but still active, both in the labour market (as teachers, nursery school teachers, accountants) or in voluntary work. Similar to the Roma women, all of them are mothers. They were joined in the workshops by three researchers and a group of university students. The workshops were held in the city library, located in the town’s large cultural centre called “House of Encounters”. From the second day on, we video recorded the meetings.

In the first workshop, the non-local participants explained that the themes of the joint work will include the relationship between Romani and Hungarian, and how Roma and non-Roma in the city, and the participants in the workshop formulate ideas about each other’s ways of speaking, and the ways they talk to each other. In order to adopt participatory principles, the academic participants emphasised that this was only a framework and that the exact topics should be identified together. It was underlined that we needed to develop themes which were of interest to local and to academic researchers. Academic participants emphasised the importance of reflexivity. Theoretical frameworks were provided by the academic side while local knowledge was the expertise of the non-academic participants.

The first days of the workshop series were spent not only getting to know each other, but also writing an article for the local newspaper in order to introduce ourselves as a research group to the local community. First, conversations evolved around two main themes: family (intergenerational coexistence) and social diversity and tensions. On the third day, we opted for writing about the latter for the newspaper. The article was written by taking detailed notes of our discussions. With little or no modification to the sentences spoken in the workshop, the university participants produced a draft text. On the fifth day, participants read the draft jointly and modified it collaboratively wherever it seemed necessary to either of the participants. The text is about local diversity that goes beyond the Roma versus non-Roma racial dichotomy, and touches on poverty as well as the ways out of it, while flagging that local society is represented by many organisations and associations in the city but Roma are usually not members of these.

During the workshops, each participant was challenged to confront the social roles prescribed for them. Non-local participants found it difficult to communicate the ethnographer’s observational and reflexive activities to the locals, to involve the locals in these activities, and thus not to reserve the right to these activities to themselves. The non-local participants talked to the local participants about how ethnographic activity is systematic and reflexive, and at one of the last meetings they introduced them to field notes as a genre, encouraging them to contribute to writing such notes. Since September 2022, further meetings have taken place in preparation for the new project, and I presented to the participants the main points, the concepts, and the extracts with a preliminary analysis from the first manuscript of this paper, asking participants to comment.

4 Participatory workshop moments

This section is based on moment analysis, proposed by Li (2011) as an approach to translanguaged discourse moments. Such moments are linguistically creative and seem salient to both the participants and the researcher (Li and Zhu 2013). Li states that languaging can be understood as a combination of physiological, biological, cognitive and social processes, shaped not only by the specific situation in which communication takes place but also by the cultural determinants and life stories of the participants (2018: 17, referencing Thibault 2017). Furthermore, translanguaging has been put forth as a new methodological approach in applied linguistics: one which pushes “the boundaries of knowledge production about language” (Lee 2022: 5). The latter is similar, on a theoretical plane, to the way in which translanguaging challenges the boundaries between named languages in bilinguals’ languaging practices. At the same time, translanguaging counters the abyssal thinking which assumes a gap between speakers with monolingual practices or practices seen as closer to the standard and speakers characterised by translingual ways of speaking to the advantage of the former (García et al. 2021). Moment analysis, as Li formulates it, focuses on the momentary and evolving aspect of communication, an action “at a specific moment in time and the consequences of the action including the re-actions by other people” (2022: 3). The workshop discussions analysed in this paper were mostly conducted in Hungarian, while Romani appeared in the conversations only a few times, typically in anecdotes. But due to bilingual Roma participants’ cognitive activities and in-group conversations, translanguaging were continuously part of the meetings. Furthermore, promoting Romani and translanguaging was an agreed purpose of the workshops.

The workshop as a participatory ethnographic engagement and the video recordings made during the workshops, are particularly well suited for the analysis of metalanguaging data (“commentaries on the speaker’s language practices as lived experience” [Li 2022: 3]). To this end, the methodology of moment analysis is applied. A common feature of the moments to be analysed is the presence of ideologies that emerge in consequence of (in)securitisation, which determines the everyday practices of not only Tiszavasvári’s inhabitants, but also the researchers’ and students’ from Budapest. At the same time, certain comments and reports on past events or on particular practices point in the direction of a convivial cohabitation. Such practices are diverse, some fitting into the (in)securitised local reality and some challenging it. Translanguaging in certain circumstances offered an opportunity to break free from (in)securitised relationships. The analysis below expands on when and what kind of convivial practices are suited to become a transformative force which overrides ethnoracial and social dependencies and the resulting (in)securitised everyday lived experience. The chosen moments were important, because they made the participants vulnerable to a certain extent: they brought up conflicted issues in the conversation, told personal stories, allowed their monolingualism to be reframed as a disadvantage, or shared their inner struggles.

During the workshops, the first contributions from local non-Roma participants were clustered around the topics of social inclusion, patronage, and support. As noted in a collaborative fieldwork diary entry made by the researchers and students in the first evening, “many of us expected that the use of the expression raising the Roma on the part of the participating non-Roma would make the Roma participants feel resentful. Instead, one of the Roma participants latched on to the theme of raising, understanding the term as ‘helping’ and said that this was indeed what was needed”. Participants adapted to the roles assigned to them: the Roma expected “to be raised”, the non-Roma assumed the responsibility (and the position of power) of “raising”. The experience of being (in)securitised appeared explicitly in Roma accounts. The Roma participants started to see the workshops as a safe place where they can talk in confidence about the acts of (in)securitisation they suffer in their daily lives. They told many anecdotes and described countless situations where they had such experiences.

The first afternoon was spent getting to know each other. It turned out that one of the points that united the participants was the importance of family and children. In the evening, non-locals reviewed the event and decided to put the topic of family at the heart of the discussions the next day. Two groups were formed to review the similarities and differences in the way the Roma and non-Roma think about family. One of the groups included the following participants: two Roma women (Amanda and Bianka), two non-Roma women (Cecilia and Dia), three students (Enikő, Fiona and Gábor) and the author (János). At the end of the group work, members summarised what they have talked about so that they can report back to the other group. The following discussion took place (excerpt 1; the conversations in Hungarian are translated into English. Romani resources are also indicated in the original language. Transcription marks: (.) A micropause; (1.0) A timed pause; (( )) Analyst comments; - A cut off; (x) unclear text; (…) omitted parts; bold Romani resources, written as by local participants, transparent (phonemic) and with letters of the Hungarian alphabet; names are changed, except for researchers):

In the discussion, the participants associate with each other three sites in which acts of (in)securitisation have their consequences: the playground, the church and the football field. The playground is construed in this passage by the Roma as a symbolic site of their (in)securitisation. Reports about the playground and other public spaces appear in the non-Roma-dominated online spaces, too, but in another way: Roma youths, with their loud and inappropriate behaviour, insecuritise the non-Roma, threatening their peace. This is part of a broader discourse about the ways in which Roma appear in various social spaces where their behaviour is seen as inappropriate. The Roma’s accounts of discrimination in church, must have been particularly painful for the non-Roma participants, who are active members of the local church. In this case, Bianka did not speak as the Roma usually do; she did not adapt to the expectations of the white listening subject (Flores and Rosa 2015), but confronted the non-Roma participants with some of the Roma’s grievances. This led to a moment of silence, and it is this tension that Amanda tried to alleviate with the remark “and of course not each of the Hungarians”. By mentioning the football pitch, I brought a typically non-Roma grievance into the conversation. The Roma women’s responses show that the feeling of being insecuritised in concrete situations of open clashes is mutual (just as in the case of the playground). They do not mention specific people as actors insecuritising them, but appeal more to a general ideological position circulating among members of the non-Roma majority, a construed subjectivity (cf. Schaffer and Nasar 2018).

Overall, this moment (and many others) shows that the acts of (in)securitisation determine both the participants’ workshop conversations and their daily life experience. While the Roma’s insecuritization is more relatable to a general actor, the non-Roma relate being insecuritised by more to specific actors and specific events: a bad experience on the football field, the loss of peace at home due to Roma noise-makers in the street, and even drivers going too fast, to mention but a few typical complaints. Such accounts of (in)securitisation, however, are permeated with convivial aspirations. Participants were found to have convivial capabilities which, to varying degrees and perhaps only occasionally, but nonetheless recurrently, enabled them to detach themselves from the dependencies demarcated by discourses of (in)securitisation. The moments analysed below illustrate the way in which this happens.

The other group, alongside the one cited in Excerpt 1, worked simultaneously. After they finished, one of the students, Heléna summarized the findings, then started the following plenary conversation (excerpt 2, Katalin is a local Roma, Lilla a local non-Roma participant, Eszter is a researcher).

In these recollections, convivial experiences are tied to the past, the childhood of the two participants speaking. Expressions of bonding appear in these accounts through non-verbal phatic activities such as sitting at a common table or holding the child (these images are more easily recalled than verbal activities, which are already forgotten). Blommaert states that conviviality is expressed through phatic activities, which he sees as “very relevant, as a really important structure of social life through which people manage to agree and get on with each other in spite of deep inequalities and bewildering diversity” (2013: 89, italics in the original). A few other workshop moments also highlight this kind of relationships between Roma and non-Roma: Roma in subordinate positions receive some kind of benefit in return for doing work or providing other services. When the I presented the excerpt and its proposed analysis to the participants, a discussion took place around the topic of whether this relationship was interest-based or rather friendship-like. Participants stressed that the relationship discussed in this excerpt was built on trust. At the same time, as this was also an employment relationship, they agreed that there was a dependency on the part of the Roma. In the end, participants agreed that it would be difficult to separate these strands. The common feature of these relationships is, even when a bond is formed between the partners, that they do not override (in)securitised conditions. This kind of conviviality exists within them but does not challenge them.

At the workshops there were moments when the participants were able to step out of the social roles, which impose on the non-Roma an attitude of patronising, condescending support and on the Roma an attitude of complaining and begging for security in the midst of (in)securitised relations. These moments were decisive because they took the participants out of the insecuritised order in which they live. They were based not on individual economic interest, but on respect for the autonomy of others or, even, on shared interest. Excerpt 3 and 4 present two such subversive moments. Excerpt 3 shows one of the translanguaging moments where Romani came to the surface. Participants considered in a plenary session the topics being relevant for all, and I asked the participants to make suggestions. One of the Roma participants, Bianka, started to answer the question first. (Lili is a Roma, Borbála and Dia are non-Roma participants).

Bianka here diverts from the patterns which characterised the voices of the Roma participants so far, and, with a gesture, she also raises the possibility that the Roma might be responsible for maintaining (in)securitised relations. This moment is significant not only because of the gesture of reciprocity towards the non-Roma participants but also because of the Romani sentence uttered. The utterance by which Bianka characterised insecuritised discourses of Romani speakers was immediately translated into Hungarian as an act of knowledge sharing. The Romani sentence reveals another layer of reciprocity: it was uttered when one of the Roma participants wanted to bring up an example of insecuritisation caused by the Roma (“Well, the Roma can also get it like…”) to parallel the insecuritised situations generated by the non-Roma. Furthermore, the Romani utterances raised the non-Roma’s interest, and put Romani speakers in the role of experts and non-Romani speakers-as-learners in a more vulnerable position. Bianka used translanguaging as a convivial tool to transform group dynamics.

In the activity from which Excerpt 4 is taken, participants discussed in groups how they would go about creating an imaginary event in the city where everyone could feel as comfortable as possible. The discussion was based on previous experience at a concert on the main square of the city. Most non-local and Roma participants of the workshop were present at the event, which took place a month earlier. Participants were discussing details of an imaginary event when Dia, one of the non-Roma participants, interrupted them with the following (Excerpt 4):

Dia makes in this comment clear that the changes in her attitude are the outcome of the workshop conversations and the development of personal relationships between the two groups. She reports that her neighbour, who works as civilian neighbourhood patrol, expressed the view that it was mainly the Roma who disturbed the event because they were drunk. This fits in well with the discourses along which members of the non-Roma majority, otherwise in a securitised situation, construct the image of the Roma minority who, according to these discourses, insecuritise the majority in everyday situations. In consequence of the “very nice” workshop discussions, Dia, with a rather unusual, decisive gesture, withdrew herself from the conversation with her neighbour, also giving a sign of protest against the discursive practices of (in)securitisation usual in similar situations. By telling us the story she shared with the workshop participants an act of a convivial capability overriding discourses of (in)securitisation, forming a standpoint which is not necessarily in line with the position held by most non-Roma in the city. In short, it goes against the established and dominant patterns of (in)securitisation practised by most inhabitants of the city.

The participants agreed on Day 1 that the university participants would not publish anything without the knowledge of the local participants, and would endeavour to involve the locals in the publication process in the future, when the project, for which this series of workshops have prepared the participants, begins. Therefore, I presented the above ideas to the participants in September, when they met to start the new project. In a short presentation, I introduced the concepts of (in)securitisation and conviviality to the participants, showed the four excerpts and briefly summarised how he analysed them. When I asked the participants’ feedback, one of the non-Roma participants said that the summary “covers the things that were discussed. And it’s good to be involved in this, so that this is really something that can work in the future ((unintelligible part, 0.3)). If just one human relationship changes, that’s the change for the better.”

During the presentation, one of the participating university students took minutes and noted down the following: Some local participants took notes, others were touched that their stories about human relations in the past became part of the text (cf. Excerpt 2). A bilingual participant suggested to write about more positive things and mentioned that as a child she had a good relationship with one of the monolingual participants. When I asked what other positive things could be mentioned, another bilingual participant said that “there would be a lot of past experiences”. The main concern of the participants was the contrast between the past, which was perceived as richer in relationships between the Roma and non-Roma, and the present, which was perceived as more difficult, with Roma and non-Roma isolated from each other. They experienced the workshop as a space where this isolation was altered and looked for ways to extend this experience beyond the workshop. After a workshop in September they concluded that it was good to have everyone there, and that “no one ran away, we are sitting here after work”, as one of the participants said. A Roma woman added: “we will tell the others”.

5 Conclusions

In the above analysis, the concepts of (in)securitisation and conviviality were applied jointly in the context of a series of workshops in which participatory ethnographic activities were carried out. The simultaneous application of the two concepts was based on the idea that they potentially complement each other. (In)securitisation is a convenient tool to capture systematically ethnoracial and social dependencies, relations of power, and threat. Conviviality focuses on the exceptional, which, this paper argues, is related primarily to the individual, and it is intertwined with translanguaging insofar as it counters racial and social segregation as well as monolingual norms. This is reflected in the sociolinguistic interpretations of conviviality, which are speaker-centred, describing it as a general attitude or a particular local ideology.

Data came from recorded workshop discussions of participatory research activities. This material proved to be particularly suitable for the examination of (in)securitisation versus conviviality and their simultaneous presence in participants’ verbal and non-verbal behaviour. First, professional researchers and invited research participants worked together; thus, the interpretation of the data used was aided by both the experience gained in the research situation and the analysis of the recordings. Second, in the workshop, the participants not only reproduce the (in)securitised conditions in which they normally live, but (as the work progresses) also reflect on them, and they do so with increasing critical awareness and by mobilising translingual practices. Third, they not only talk about, but also experience conviviality: they listen to each other, learn from each other and grow closer to each other. As García-Sanches points out, there is a growing consensus that educational projects to combat exclusion and racism can only be successful if tensions are explicitly addressed (2020: 45). As participatory activities create a space for, and even require, these issues to be addressed explicitly, they are particularly suited for this purpose. Participatory research has the potential to mediate between different stakeholders in a project (cf. Bodó and Fazakas 2023) or to resolve the conflict between research and (Roma) advocacy movements (cf. Smith et al. 2020). However, in order to realise this potential, participants need to consider and address power relations. The workshops provided a space for participants to identify their own convivial skills that help them to overcome ethnoracial and social dependencies which are traceable in linguistic practices and ideologies and manifested in (in)securitised realities.

The analysis contributes to our understanding of conviviality and convivial ideologies, as follows. Conviviality is embedded in a network of social stereotypes and relations, and not simply a harmonious way of living together which is to be celebrated. It always exists in the midst of (in)securitised relationships and in Tiszavasvári it is also associated with monolingual norms. The analysis of the workshop moments showed that certain convivial practices are enacted without countering (in)securitised relationships or the social positions of the participants within them. Typically, these are practices which make it easier for parties to live together: they are in accordance with certain individual interests and are characterised by a high adaptability to the situation on the part of the actors involved. Examples include past stories recalled by participants, when Roma helpers were regular visitors in non-Roma households and could even be seen as “granny’s friends” by the non-Roma children of the time. But such practices have no transformative power. Even if they are based on trust and filled with personal bonding, they maintain the asymmetrical power dynamics between the two groups. Workshop moments have also shown, however, that there are other types of convivial practices, too, which erode (in)securitisation by working against it, and in doing so, they contribute to redrawing power imbalances in social relations. These moments might also push against monolingual norms: in Excerpt 3, translanguaging plays a role in overcoming a situation which reminds participants of tensions; translanguaging brings a new dimension to the fixity of pre-existing social roles and interaction patterns, which allows participants to switch perspectives. The distinguishing feature between convivial practices in the midst of insecuritisation and those that challenge it is whether convivial practices are motivated by individual (economic) interest or by a common, purpose-driven interest, combined with linguistic practices which are, just like conviviality, exceptional or irregular.