The Struggle for Anti-racist Environmental and Housing Justice: A View from a Militant Research Project in Cluj-Napoca, Romania
Main Article Content
Article Sidebar
Published
Apr 29, 2025
Enikő Vincze
George Iulian Zamfir
Vasile Gâlbea
Abstract
This article presents the struggle for anti-racist environmental and housing justice in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, and argues for militantresearch that provides knowledge and arguments to transform political thinking and practices. In discussing their activist research,the authors offer a methodological toolkit for activist knowledge production that might serve actions for social justice beyond the PataRât case discussed – a place in the city of Cluj-Napoca, Romania, where Romani residents are forced to live in proximity to toxic landfills. The article presents how a local movement, of which the authors are part, conducted multidisciplinary militant research to support actions against racist environmental and housing injustice. The article discusses different understandings of these concepts anddescribes the formation of the residential area and Romani residents’ health conditions in the toxic environment of Pata Rât. The article also offers an interpretive synthesis of various types of empirical materials. In other words, militant research links environmentaljustice and housing justice via an anti-racist stance in the context of Romania. It stresses that without changing the structural conditions created by capitalism that force racialised people to live in polluted environments, legal recognition of housing and environmental rights will not mitigate intersectional injustice.
How to Cite
Vincze, E., Zamfir, G. I., & Gâlbea, V. (2025). The Struggle for Anti-racist Environmental and Housing Justice: A View from a Militant Research Project in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. Critical Romani Studies, 7(1), 76–93. https://doi.org/10.29098/crs.v7i1.183
Article Details
Keywords
anti-racism, environmental justice, housing justice, militant research, Pata Rât, Romanian Roma
Section
Articles

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication. The work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.