Those Who Count: Expert Practices of Roma Classification

Author Biography

• Andrzej Mirga, Chair of the Roma Education Fund

  Andrzej Mirga is a Polish Roma, an ethnologist, analyst and activist. He currently serves as
  the chair of the Roma Education Fund (REF). Prior to this, he headed the Contact Point for
  Roma and Sinti Issues at the OSCE’s Warsaw-based Office for Democratic Institutions and
  Human Rights (ODIHR) from December 2006 to November 2013. He was the first Roma to
  study at Jagiellonian University in Krakow where he later taught (until 1992). He co-founded
  the first Polish Roma association after the fall of communism and led it as its President (1991–
  1995). Mirga is also a long-term associate of the Project on Ethnic Relations, a U.S.-based
  nongovernmental mediating organization with headquarters in Princeton, New Jersey. Here, he
  also formed the Roma Advisory Council, a small team of prominent Romani leaders, activists
  and experts from Central and Eastern Europe, and the United States. He served at the Committee
  of Experts on Roma and Travellers of the Council of Europe, also as its chair, and later joined
  Poland’s Common Commission of the Government and National and Ethnic Minorities as well
  as the High-Level Group on Labour Market and Disadvantaged Ethnic Minorities (European
  Commission, 2005–2007). He has been publishing widely since the 1990s.