Camilla Ida Ravnbøl

I have worked with research concerning Roma in Europe since 2005. My PhD thesis (2018) concerned Roma women and men from Romania who live on the streets of Copenhagen and who primarily earn their living on refundable beverage containers. The PhD project adopted a legal anthropological perspective on how social actors understand and act according to legal frameworks and categories and relate this legal consciousness to other areas of human experience. In order to have more nuanced insight into gender variations, attention was also given to differences in the experiences of Roma women and men respectively. In my current post-doctoral research position, I am part of a larger research project, which is headed by Associate Professor Atreyee Sen, entitled: “'After money, what is debt?': Indebted Urban Poor Households in Emerging Cashless Economies". The larger project explores the impact of financial turns towards cashlessness on the currently cash-reliant and indebted urban poor in middle and high income countries. My sub-project focuses on Romanian Roma who travel to Copenhagen (Denmark) and live in homelessness. These families are often caught up in spirals of debt to local usurers in both Romania and Denmark. Roma households make up a majority of the poor who remain “unbanked” in Europe and rely on cash-based financial arrangements within their local communities. My project explores how cashless initiatives influence the economic possibilities that poor Roma households have for repaying their loans, and how such initiatives potentially change formal and informal debt relations. Thematic and regional specialization: Denmark, Romania, human rights, gender, Roma, EU migration and EU citizenship, homelessness and scrap collectors.

Posts by This Author

Cashlessness: A Look at Life on the Margins of a Digitalizing Economy

AnthroPod

Cashlessness: A Look at Life on the Margins of a Digitalizing Economy

In this episode of AnthroPod, guest producers Camilla Ida Ravnbøl and Marie Kolling explore the impact that the global trend towards digitalizing economies has ... More