Privatisation and its racialised others:

Roma voices on segregated education and blame in Hungary

Abstract

This article explores how increasingly privatised primary education is experienced by Roma parents in a Hungarian small town, Akácos. Through the investigation of the town’s primary schooling system, this piece opens up space for an inquiry into the ways the boundaries of public and private are being redrawn by local and national education policy. As these rearrangements occur, the meanings of ‘deficits’ and racialisation shift, cementing education segregation into the social fabric of the town. Applying the lens of critical race theory and its focus on counter-storytelling in relation to deficit positionings, a fourfold local interpretation of the effects of privatisation arises in the context of education. Roma parents experience declining educational resources and the privatisation of schools into church-run institutions as additional material burdens, ‘loving’ segregation, the privatisation of pedagogic added value and the privatisation of blame, materialising in racial othering. Through this, the article sheds light on the complex interplay between the social production of deficits and processes of educational privatisation through the voices of Roma parents in a specific locality.