Sharing the Insecure Sensible: The Circulation of Images of Roma on Social Media

Abstract

Ivasiuc draws on a digital ethnography of material shared by a neighbourhood patrol in Rome on social media, and argues that the spectacle of Facebook-sharing has the triple effect of obfuscating the obscene inclusion of the Roma, multiplying insecurities by reproducing and circulating stereotypical representations of threat embodied in immigrants and the Roma, while simultaneously building a community grounded in fear and hate. Such practices constitute a complex of securitarian visuality in which security becomes a powerful principle of social sorting, transforming social relations in the neighbourhood, and legitimizing the subordination and exclusion of those constructed as threatening ‘others’. Ivasiuc builds upon Mirzoeff’s ‘complex of visuality’ to expand its theoretical relevance at the level of everyday interactions in local settings.