ABSTRACT
Contextualized stereotypes become ways of marking boundaries and evaluate the social distance between groups. This chapter shows operative and prevailing norms of moral distance that portray Romani people as out of sync with civilized behaviour seen across the attitudinal spectrum. Social distance turns into moral distance, social exclusion turns into moral exclusion, when people's individual and community worth and dignity are not fully recognized and altered or transformed without possibility of retort seems as deficient, incomplete, out of place. This chapter explores about discursive psychologists call 'disposition talk' as a resource for blaming Romani people for their own predicament and delegitimizes their ways of being in the world. Dispositional formulations are the building blocks of a discursive 'lay ontology' that naturalizes the moral character of Roma. Stereotypical predicates attached to the category 'Roma' are explained with reference to the moral character of the Roma. This chapter shows descriptions of spatial transgression embedded in stories of impropriety and misconduct 'moral work'.
