The contributions of this section take stock of scholarly literatures outside the narrow field of Romani studies and address wider issues of power relations within institutions producing knowledge.
Andrew Ryder explores the debates around the epistemological implications of conducting engaged forms of research, especially by Roma academics. In recent years, the EANRS, as the main forum of exchange among academics involved in researching Roma issues, has been the stage of telltale battles announcing a decisive transformation: power and the legitimacy of current hierarchies are being contested by Roma researchers increasingly joining the ranks of Romani studies academics and unsettling notions of objective, neutral knowledge. In many ways, this is a war already fought elsewhere and in earlier times: the birth of public anthropology as knowledge serving the aim of building a just world (Beck 2009; Beck and Maida 2015) bears testimony to the force of the idea that the potential of research should be used for emancipatory goals. The antithetic argument maintains faith in the illusion of objectivity, claiming that engaged research necessarily implies biased premises on which it is judged improper to construct meaningful knowledge. At stake are, unmistakably, definitions of “meaningful”: while for adepts of scientism, meaningful knowledge is objective, detached and neutral, for activist researchers, the meaningfulness of their knowledge is derived from its usefulness to bring about transformative change. Through a factional conversation creatively staged, Ryder reenacts the dialogues within the EANRS, deliberately polarizing the positions on this debate so as to render the fracture all the more striking. He comments on the opposition between scientism and critical research by stressing how the first favors the detachment of academics from the object of their inquiry, whereas the latter values embodied knowledge from the standpoint of the researched, blurring, in the process, the boundary between researchers and the people whose lives they investigate—and thus also between research and activism. Ryder emphasizes that research is shaped in crucial ways by institutional and economic factors, and comments on the example of EU-funded research, which, in the case of Roma-related knowledge production, risks reinforcing existing problematic power relations. On the one hand, while the participation of Roma in research is a trendy buzzword in applications for funding, it appears to be more often than not tokenistic; on the other hand, the bureaucracy inherent in the process of accessing EU funds acts as to favor professionalized NGOs above community-based organizations (CBOs), which might have a broader Roma participation. Yet the chapter ends on a more optimistic tone: while noting the recent motion proposed by Thomas Acton and Yaron Matras within the Gypsy Lore Society, recognizing that the institution has not been immune to prejudicial attitudes toward the Roma and committing itself to “promote knowledge of and engagement with Romani communities,” Ryder is confident that the access of Romani scholars to the community of Romani studies will promote a paradigm shift toward more engaged forms of research, and predicates that diverging views should enter into a constructive dialogue.
Taking up the topic of the ingression of scholars of Romani background in academic circles, Angéla Kóczé’s chapter uses autoethnography and accounts of other Roma women in academia to expand on the adversities they encounter in their attempts to build scientific and professional legitimacy among peers. The women she interviews emphasize the painstaking labor of shaping a space for themselves—as Roma and as women—and creating themselves “from scratch, in environments where one is not supposed to exist,” for, until very recently, in the research equation, Roma were objectified as researched subjects, and never in the powerful position of those who actively shape knowledge. Kóczé thus deeply unsettles a readership engaged in the ethnographic investigation of Roma lived experience, by contesting its position as research object solely and claiming the legitimacy to generate knowledge on its own terms.
To make sense of the struggles Roma women face in academic environments and to chart the hierarchies and the power relations imbued with racism and sexism, which their presence unsettles, Kóczé mobilizes feminist and critical race theory, emphasizing the intersectionality of the positions her interlocutors occupy, as women and as Roma. She delivers a poignant critique of mainstream Romani studies by building further on Romani and Black feminist scholars who pointed out racist and sexist epistemologies at work, as well as power imbalances in academia itself. She criticizes the choice of Romani studies to work with the analytical category of “ethnicity” instead of “race,” showing how the emphasis on Roma as an “ethnic” group renders racism invisible, thus debilitating a critique of the hierarchies though which the Roma are constructed as an inferior “culture,” in what Balibar (1991) termed “neo-racism.” For Kóczé, as for her interlocutors, race is, to the contrary, a very practical issue: in academia, the racialization of Romani scholars amounts to their inferiorization and infantilization, often depriving them of the legitimacy to shape the way in which knowledge is created. She ponders on the pivotal role of these women in transgressing borders, a metaphor fitting at once the act of an insurgent trespassing of invisible but powerful boundaries into the headquarters where knowledge is assembled, and the permanent back-and-forth crossing of the porous—and often completely dissolved—border between academia and activism. In line with earlier arguments underlining the intrinsically dialogical character of Romani feminism (Kóczé 2008), she emphasizes the role of Roma women in academia as skillful “passers” between worlds, in a position from which they “seek to create a politics of possibility” not only by connecting them, but also by playing a paramount role as mentors of the emerging generation of Romani activist-scholars.
To a large extent, the contributions by Ryder and Kóczé can be read as reactions to the institutional debates in Romani studies about the engagement of Romani scholars, exemplifying marvelously how academic literature, rather than being produced by neutral actors in aseptic and “objective” environments devoid of power relations, is carved in crucial ways by debates and power struggles in the scientific community: as the locus where knowledge is generated is itself composed of a social fabric rife with power struggles, knowledge cannot be detached from the context of its production.
The interconnectedness between knowledge and the environment of its own genesis is also one of the arguments in the last chapter of this section. In line with the first section’s emphasis on the usefulness of ethnographic research methods, while continuing to question some of the strands of Romani activism, Ana Ivasiuc critiques the pervasive narrative of victimhood and entrapment transpiring from militant advocacy discourses and “gray literature” coproduced by certain NGOs and powerful donors, which sometimes also percolates through in academic writings. Using observations from her experience as research coordinator in a Roma NGO, Ivasiuc contextualizes the production of the victimhood narrative, by showing how and why this discourse is manufactured at the heart of the development apparatus in which CSOs, forced to compete for funds, are compelled to fabricate a discourse based on buzzwords and tropes of victimhood, which simultaneously constitutes a practice of accessing funds. This narrative impels a pessimistic bias, which sometimes bends the interpretation of research data, altering the process of selection of quantitative findings to stress the shortfalls and inadequacies of the Roma. She shows how the emphasis on the “lacks” and “deficits” of Roma, simultaneous to the neglect of their forms of agency, is a perverse form of Orientalism sustaining paternalistic policy interventions and feeding the wider discursive needs of the development apparatus. Building on her ethnographic study of the conflicts within the implementation of a World Bank–sponsored community development project, Ivasiuc discusses forms of agency in which Roma groups engage, suggesting a renewal of activist epistemologies within and through gray literature attentive to these forms of agency.
Renewing Activisms
The last section of the volume explores some of the promising “margins” potentially able to renew Romani activism.
In her chapter, Margaret Greenfields argues that besides activism for the empowerment of Roma, and high quality research providing “moral and practical arguments for change,” the third crucial element likely to bring about the betterment of Roma lives is appropriate policy. While the volume addresses the first two dimensions extensively, her contribution specifically deals with the underresearched nexus between Roma-related activism,
