This book project is a follow-up of Revisiting Ditró, and focuses primarily on the critique of Romania’s progressive-neoliberal, middle-class-ideologised, and utilitarian-type of developmental-idealist national framework of interpretation that operates in front of the increasing number of third-country migrant workers. It examines the limitations and double standards of the open-border and pro-immigration approach, its unjust and violent discursive and audiovisual manifestations in reshaping the political community, and its pernicious material consequences in the lives and experiences of subordinated social classes, whether native or foreign, ethnicized or racialized.

It is a critique of how a society’s mainstream, majority, or core groups sustain a hegemonic discourse by controlling language, meaning, knowledge, and memory to construct the immigration-development link, while demarcating their boundaries vis-à-vis a cultural periphery, and reproducing social hierarchies. The book also examines the non-hegemonic voices within Romania’s immigration debate, with a strong focus on how nationalist and essentialist views take shape in reactionary collective action, and partake in the strengthening and diversification of injustices and violence at the intersection of class, ethnicity, and race.

PUBLICATIONS _

2026  |  Tamás Kiss & Luis Escobedo

_The replacement of ‘Székely workers’. Class, race, and ethnicity in Romania’s first anti-immigration protests. Nationalities Papers. (In print)

2025  |  Luis Escobedo

_Review of Hidden Hate: The Resilience of Xenophobia, written by Matthew Creighton. Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 31 (1): 157-159. [Read here]

PRESENTATIONS _

2024 – 2026

_Panel on film R.M.N. (Mungiu, 2022), with film’s protagonist Judith State, researchers Tamás Kiss, and Rishana Wijethunge and professor Horia M. Dijmarescu (University of Pittsburgh), Pitt in Romania project, Cinema Union, since May 2024, Bucharest, Romania. [Read here]

2025

_‘Unmasking the racialized “diligent migrant worker”’, Masking and unmasking the ‘migrant worker’ in Romania’s open-border imaginary (as panel convenor), Voices and Silences: 50 years of the Society for Romania Studies, Babeș-Bolyai University, 29-31 May, Cluj-Napoca, Romania. [Read here]

2024

_‘Injusticia epistemológica en el debate migratorio en Rumanía’ (Epistemic injustice in Romania’s migration debate), Universidad Nacional Intercultural Fabiola Salazar Leguía de Bagua – UNIFSL-B, 10-11 October, Bagua, Peru. (online)

_‘Epistemic Injustice in Romania’s Immigration Debate: The Weaponization of Collective Memory through Film Representation,’ Representations of Class, Race and Ethnicity in the “New Romanian Political Community” under Neoliberal Hegemony (panel), Historical Materialism, Babeș-Bolyai University & Tranzit.ro/Cluj, 29-31 August, Cluj-Napoca. [Read here]

_‘Epistemic Injustice in Romania’s Immigration Debate: The Weaponization of Collective Memory through Film Representation,’ Art, Film, and Narrative: Exploring Memory Activism, Migration, and Nostalgia (panel), Memories in Transit, Memory Studies Association 8th Annual Conference, 18-20 July, Lima, Peru. [Read here]

2022 – 2024

_On racism and migration, Master’s of Anthropology, SNSPA, 21 October 2022, 4 November 2022, 8 November 2023, Bucharest, Romania. [Read here]

2023

_Guest Lecturer, Modulo 6: Los ODS y la Migración (Module 6: The SDG’s and Migration), Gestión de la Movilidad Humana y Políticas Públicas (course), Escuela de Ciencia Política y Gobernabilidad, Universidad Nacional de Trujillo (UNT), 29 September, Trujillo, Peru. (online)

MEDIA _

2025

_‘MAGYARADÁS / Szembeszéd XX. – Migráció, identitáspánik, osztályharc,’ Magyaradás TVR, 27 October, Romania. [Watch here]

_‘MAGYARADÁS / Traumák emlékezete,’ Magyaradás TVR, 20 October, Romania. [Watch here]

_Iulia Hau, ‘REPORTAJ Cum au ajuns să călătorească DJ-ii srilankezi constant între Italia și România pentru petreceri underground ale comunității lor. “Au început și românii să danseze”,’ HotNews, 20 April, Romania. [Read here]

2024

_Gerardo Cailloma, ‘La migración,’ El Detector, 23 November, Peru. [Read here]

2023

_‘Imigrant în România, un subiect mai puțin dezbătut’, Intrare Liberă, TVR Cultural, 23 February, Romania. [Read here]