Dr Ashli Mullen

First Book Fellow 2023-24

Racialised Capitalism at the Margins: an ethnography with Roma migrant workers

This book aims to elucidate how racialised capitalism operates today, as illustrated by the experiences of Roma migrant workers. Working against the grain at the interstices of ethnography and discourse analysis, it is based on over three years of ethnographic fieldwork (2016-2020), supplemented by new research using digital methods carried out throughout the pandemic with former participants as Co-Researchers. In examining the racialisation of Roma in the press, on the street, at the workplace, and by the state, the book’s key contribution to knowledge is in rendering explicit the links between welfare chauvinism, economic exploitation, and deportability in the racialisation of Roma migrants in the UK.

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Areas of interest

Sociology Value Political Economy of Race Welfare Exploitation Racial Capitalism Roma Immigration Ethnography Marxism

Cohort

FBF1

Biography

Ashli Mullen is a sociologist who works on questions of value and racialised capitalism. Her research explores how the links between welfare chauvinism, economic exploitation, and deportability structure the conditions that racialised migrant workers labour under. She is the author of ‘‘Race’, Place and Territorial Stigmatisation: The Construction of Roma Migrants in and through Govanhill, Scotland’ in New Scots: Scotland's immigrant communities since 1945.

She is currently working on a monograph based on her doctoral research, as well as a second book - co-authored with Satnam Virdee - which is provisionally titled Marxism and Racialised Capitalism (to be published by Polity Press in 2024). Ashli also works as Creative Director of Romano Lav, an anti-racist Roma migrant organisation based in Govanhill, where she continues to work with the communities that her research is indebted to.

Biographical details correct as of 18.09.24