Some of these debates have tended to dichotomize between “neutral” and “objective” knowledge, on the one hand, and knowledge “tainted” and disqualified by activism, on the other hand; yet these rigid categorizations foreclose a more nuanced reflection on the ways in which knowledge is being produced and shaped. The simplistic division between “scientific” and “activist” research misses a number of important points. The “quietistic dream of unsullied professionalism” (Heyman 2010) may obscure the ideological roots of seemingly neutral “expert” knowledge. The production of knowledge is a social process, taking place in particular historical contexts and through dynamics replete with power and subjected to cultural trends, social pressures, and political interests. Claiming the impartiality and neutrality of knowledge attests at best a form of unpardonable naïveté regarding the ways in which knowledge is being influenced by its embeddedness in power-laden contexts, including through the meta-epistemological question of who has the power and appropriate forms of capital—symbolic, social—to legitimize the validity of research itself. Knowledge and power, we know at least since Foucault (Foucault and Gordon 1980), are inseparable. This brings us to the second point that these dichotomies miss, forcefully articulated by advocates for a public anthropology (Beck 2009; Beck and Maida 2013 and 2015): the sources of legitimacy of engaged research are grounded elsewhere than in purely epistemological criteria, requiring not a choice, but a constant move between social and epistemological commitments (Hale 2006: 105). Rather than positing engaged and disengaged forms of scholarship as antithetic, and advocating for one or the other, or superimposing critique and commitment in a single epistemological engagement, what emerges as unquestionably more productive is a dialectical move between them (Montesinos Coleman 2015), and also beyond them. This move allows for questioning the very categories and frames upon which both research and activism are predicated—again, a “trans of beyond” (Brubaker 2016). One of the meaningful messages which this collection of essays conveys is a call to move beyond simplistic dichotomies—“good” versus “bad” activism, “objective” versus “activist” research stemming from “Roma” versus “non-Roma” scholars—and to critically interrogate the contexts in which these debates and the constructed epistemological and political objects they criticize are produced, contested, and (de)legitimized, and how they further shape the assembling of knowledge. Far from being inconsequential and locked up in a putative ivory tower, the knowledge produced by scholars in positions of “experts” has the power to affect political and representational processes (Okely 1997; Willems 1997; van Baar 2011; Surdu 2015; Surdu and Kovats 2015; Law and Kovats 2018), making a compelling case for privileging reflexivity in scholarly writing.
Beyond the productivity of scholarly discomfort with prescribed categories, it is also worthwhile to reflect upon the emancipatory politics at the core of Romani activism, brimming with contradictions and identity double binds (Kovats 2003; Vermeersch 2006; Law and Kovats 2018). While some of these questions reemerge forcefully from the debates on the establishment of the ERIAC, some of the chapters in this volume directly engage with the contradictions of past and contemporary forms of activism. There is nothing of real simplicity and self-evidence in projects of emancipatory politics, and the often-ambivalent workings of activist politics should not be obscured by an uncritical taken-for-grantedness of empowerment projects’ outcomes. The proliferation of the word “empowerment” itself has masked its ambiguities and the contradictory political projects in which it is embedded (Ivasiuc 2014; see also van Baar, this volume). Activism cannot do without a continuous and arduous “reflective practice” (Schon 1983), perpetually interrogating learned and unlearned lessons, and, more importantly, seeking other possible forms of being political.
Reflexivity as Practice: Arguments and Dialogues
The idea of this volume emerged during an exchange between the editors, in which an apparently simple question was posed: “How did you, as an activist, help the Roma through your research?” To this question, we found that very few unambiguous and comfortable answers could be given before carefully deconstructing every word of it. In lieu of an answer, many more questions emerged: about the possibilities and ethics of activism, the ontology of research as a tool for change, and the pitfalls of being all too certain that as activists or researchers—or both—we are really making a difference. None of these questions could circumvent the analysis of the complexities and ambivalence of both activism and research. What was initially requested as a relatively short and straightforward answer became a set of questions ultimately leading to an entire book project in which we set out to explore the intersection between contemporary—but also past and possibly future forms of—activism, and research involving Romani groups. Thus, the question was transformed to explore the mechanisms and phenomena that produce ambivalence in the seemingly straightforward endeavor to work with the Roma from activist and academic perspectives. Rather than aiming at building consensus, the volume is intended to unsettle certainties, to provoke questions, and to throw a “working dissensus” (see Ryder, this volume) among activists, researchers, and policy practitioners and professionals who find themselves at any of the intersections between these roles or fluctuate between their porous boundaries. The book is an attempt at bridging reflexivity and practice, and simultaneously an argument for the development of reflexivity as practice within both Romani activism and the academic production of knowledge. The authors set out to critically analyze key practices and current issues in Romani activism and academia, scrutinizing both established and emerging dynamics of Romani activism and the processes of knowledge production stemming from applied and academic research, and feeding into interventions of both governmental and nongovernmental actors. We explore the ambiguous legacies and contradictions of certain forms of activism, as well as of certain ways of conducting research, framing it, or aiming at transposing research into policy. But we also consider it crucial to explore, from the margins, certain openings and promises, both within Romani activism and academic research. The book is structured in three parts, each comprising three chapters entering in dialogue with each other, and with arguments gaining in complexity across the sections.
Renewing Methods, Renewing Sites
Romani activism, as a complex object of research, demands nuanced, nonbinary analyses, rooted in the historical and sociopolitical contexts in which it takes place, and critically aware of any underlying—explicit or implicit—normative or moral assumptions. In the first part, the authors make a case for in-depth ethnographies uniquely able to grasp the contradictions and ambiguities of activism and of the role of its protagonists. In this section, some of the ways in which activism has been framed in research become contested as simplistic and binary, whereas ethnographic approaches to instances of activism reveal the ambivalences and contradictions of historically and politically embedded activist stances and undertakings. The “local” emerges clearly as a paramount site demanding a lucid analysis beyond the temptation to romanticize it as the unique, authentic place of mobilization, but also beyond the tendency of the vast majority of analyses on Romani activism to overlook the “local” in favor of national or transnational contexts.
We start our volume with a sober analysis by Huub van Baar of the nexus between activism and research through the lens of the development of the Romani social movement in Europe, contemporaneous to the emergence of the “nongovernmental” as a distinct category of rule and research. The chapter sketches the historical and political context for the volume’s analyses, which focus mostly on post-1989 Europe. Van Baar systematizes the last thirty years of Roma-related activism and policy-making, as well as the ways in which Roma-related scholarship analyzed these developments, in a periodization comprising three phases. The first period, van Baar argues, was characterized by the emergence of civil society organizations (CSOs) funded and organized mostly through support from Western-based donors and international governing organizations (IGOs). Many Roma activists became attached to these initiatives, and the emergence of the civil society was largely applauded as a welcome development facilitating the exercise of democracy in postsocialist contexts. Subsequently, many organizations became professionalized and progressively occupied a niche of service provision between state structures and communities. In this process of governmentalization, these
