Critical Romani Studies is an international, interdisciplinary, double blind peer-reviewed journal providing a forum for activist-scholars to critically examine racial oppressions, different forms of exclusion, inequalities, and human rights abuses of Roma. Without compromising academic standards of evidence collection and analysis, the Journal seeks to create a platform to critically engage with academic knowledge production, and generate critical academic and policy knowledge targeting—amongst others—scholars, activists, and policymakers. Scholarly expertise is a tool, rather than the end, for critical analysis of social phenomena affecting Roma, contributing to the fight for social justice. The Journal especially welcomes the cross-fertilization of Romani studies with the fields of critical race studies, gender and sexuality studies, critical policy studies, diaspora studies, colonial studies, postcolonial studies, and studies of decolonization. The Journal actively solicits papers from critically-minded young Romani scholars who have historically experienced significant barriers in engaging with academic knowledge production. The Journal considers only previously unpublished manuscripts which present original, high-quality research. The Journal is committed to the principle of open access, so articles are available free of charge. All published articles undergo rigorous peer review, based on initial editorial screening and refereeing by at least two anonymous scholars.
Romani Studies Program at Central European University
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.
For centuries, the production of knowledge about Romani communities has been dominated by non-Romani scholars, institutions, and power structures. This monopoly has created a distorted and racialized understanding of Romani identity, history, and culture; an understanding that has profoundly shaped European scholarship, public policy, and everyday perceptions. This article examines the historical trajectory and ongoing consequences of this knowledge regime. It explores the roots of Gypsylorism, the influence of eugenics, the role of ethnographic bias, and the persistent structures of antigypsyism that shape how Roma are represented in academia and society. Then the article analyses the emergence of Critical Romani Studies as an intellectual response to these structures, emphasising Romani positionality and the development of Romani epistemologies as crucial interventions. It further explores the creation and role of the European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture (ERIAC) as a transnational institutional space designed to support Romani cultural and intellectual agency. ERIAC’s priorities in knowledge production, such as the development of educational platforms, critical bibliographies, and projects on resistance, are examined as examples of how Roma-led institutions can contribute to epistemic justice, historical reparation, and the transformation of academic canons. Finally, the article reflects on future directions for Roma-led research, arguing that reclaiming knowledge production is not merely an academic endeavour but a political and cultural act. By asserting Romani epistemologies and institutional presence, Critical Romani Studies challenges centuries-old hierarchies of representation and opens pathways for new, plural, and equitable forms of understanding. The article is based on an intellectual dialogue between the authors that took place on 19 September 2025.
Copyright (c) 2025 Dezso Mate, Anna Mirga-Kruszelnicka http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Foreword to the thematic issue "Racism and Romani Studies"
Copyright (c) 2025 Dezso Mate, Anna Mirga-Kruszelnicka, Iulius Rostas, Calin Rus http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Foreword to Nicolae Gheorghe’s Article: The Romani People: From Enslaved People to Citizens
This is a Foreword to Nicolae Gheorghe’s Article: The Romani People: From Enslaved People to Citizens, written by Nicoleta Bitu.
Copyright (c) 2025 Nicoleta Bitu http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Margareta Matache writes here on behalf of fellow members of the Thematic Issue editorial team: Maria Dumitru, Adrian-Nicolae Furtună, Delia Grigore, and Solvor Mjøberg Lauritzen.
Copyright (c) 2025 Magda Matache http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Slavery, Cultural Trauma, and Romani Identity
This article develops and tests a methodological approach for studying the memory of Romani slavery that transcends oral history and archival research sources, treating local mnemonics – such as oikonyms, spatial morphology, and institutionalized sources – as carriers of memory. By grounding and applying this methodology to the case of Dezrobiți village, I show how the cultural trauma of slavery reveals itself even where silence, denial, or fragmentation obscure direct narratives, collective memory, and symbols.
Copyright (c) 2025 Adrian Nicolae Furtună http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Reparative Memory and the Visibility of Roma Subjectivity in Otto Mueller’s ‘Gypsy’ Depictions – Anger, Pride, and Shame
This article offers a critical reflection by Romani intellectuals on their joint engagement with the Otto Mueller exhibition at the LWL Museum of Art and Culture in Münster (2024–2025). Moving beyond an art-historical experience, the exhibition prompted a profound confrontation with colonial memories and stereotypical representations of Romani bodies, evoking ambivalent emotions such as anger, hope, pride, and shame Positioned as German and Hungarian Romani scholars, the authors analyse Mueller’s work through a transnational and intersectional lens that foregrounds lived experience, collective memory, and epistemic responsibility. At the same time, it is important to consider Mueller’s position and function within German Expressionism – connected to Die Brücke from 1910, later professor at the State Academy in Breslau (1919–1930), and a key author of the “bathers” pictorial formula; the subsequent denunciation and confiscation of works in the Munich “Degenerate Art” exhibition of 1937 (posthumously) further underscores the visibility of his modern visual language in the period’s cultural discourse. The authors emphasise the necessity of visibility as subjectivity, shifting from being objectified to asserting agency in knowledge production and cultural representation. They highlight the limitations of counter-narratives within the exhibition and argue for deeper institutional reforms, including active participation of Romani scholars in curatorial practices. Drawing on feminist epistemologies and critical memory studies, the article articulates reparative memory culture as a transformative practice that challenges hegemonic narratives and centres Romani voices. Dialoguing with artworks by Tamás Péli and Małgorzata Mirga-Tas, it illustrates how Romani art creates reparative spaces of memory and dignity, contesting historical erasures. Ultimately, the article advocates for a decolonial and participatory memory politics that recognises Roma as knowledge producers and co-creators of culture, thus reshaping European art, memory, and scholarship without seeking to destroy them.
Copyright (c) 2025 Dezso Mate, André Raatzsch http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Romani Epistemic Resistance beyond White Fragility: Decolonial Refusal in a Workshop on Romani Genocide
This article critically engages with racialized epistemic structures that pretend to “include” Romani voices while simultaneously colonise, extract, and discipline them. Based on my lived experience in 2025 as co-trainer in a workshop on Romani genocide, I delve into the attitude of a “White” historian who perpetrated epistemic violence (Spivak 1988) by controlling the narrative, essentialising and Orientalising Romaniness, silencing Romani epistemologies, ignoring first-hand Romani family histories, and ignoring ongoing systemic biopolitical violence against Roma in Europe. This article has three aims: (1) to show that Romani epistemic sovereignty acts as a refusal to the colonial “neutrality of academia; (2) to show that so-called institutional “inclusion” is, more often than not, containment through Orientalism, neo-colonial forms of knowledge production (Trehan and Kóczé 2011) and White fragility (DiAngelo 2018); and (3) to show that acts of refusal by Romani people constitute decolonial resistance. Therefore, intertwining my lived experience with critical theory, I suggest that Romani knowledge is a theory, a method, and a decolonial intervention in and of itself. This is a call for epistemic justice and, at the same time, an assertion that Romani subalterns have spoken.
Copyright (c) 2025 Rufat Demirov http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Racialization of Roma, European Modernity, and the Entanglement of Empires
The article explores how anti-Roma racism results from the complex interplay of imperial histories and is influenced by racial thinking shaped by colonialism. Looking at the diverse primary and secondary historiographic resources about Romani people across Europe, the article shows how intra-European hierarchies set the stage for racial logic and points out the complex interplay of factors contributing to anti-Roma racism. Specifically, the article delineates how race, religion, and the rise of capitalism intersect in the racialization of Romani people in Europe, including Eastern Europe. In doing so, I interweave the fields of critical race and critical Romani studies to explore the mechanisms leading to the racialization of Roma. To understand the roots of anti-Roma racism, I examine historical processes of intra- European othering of Romani people as entangled with European modernity and colonialism. The article illuminates how Roma were placed among racialized and itinerant groups of valuable labor while they simultaneously were ostracized and persecuted as “vagrants” and “barbarians,” deemed “unwilling to work,” and inscribed with markers of non-whiteness, foreignness, and criminality. In this way, the capitalist logic established a white European norm in relation to which Roma were constructed and positioned.
Copyright (c) 2025 Lesia Pahulich http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
A Critical Review of Remembrance: Romani Slavery in Romani Activism, Arts, and Research
This article examines how the memory of Romani slavery persists in the contemporary collective consciousness of both Roma and non-Roma in Romania. It explores the tension between social amnesia and efforts to rebuild remembrance through activism, arts, and research as a way to understand the past and facilitate truth-telling and reconciliation. The article examines how – more than 170 years after the final act of abolition of Romani slavery in 1856 during an era of induced oblivion of the memory of Romani slavery – remembrance is beginning, step by step, to be rebuilt through Romani activism, arts, and research contemporary Romania after 1990, when Roma were recognised as a national minority. It analyses the memory of Romani slavery in Romania through the lens of “social amnesia”, a concept coined by historian Russell Jacoby and defined as society's repression of remembrance – the Romanian state rejects its negative past not to be placed in a bad light, as oppressor.
Copyright (c) 2025 Delia Grigore http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Romani Slavery in Romanian Historiography (1837–2023): Terminology, Perspectives, and External Influences
This article traces how Romani slavery has been written into – and more often written out of – Romanian historiography from the earliest scholarly treatment by Mihail Kogălniceanu (1837) to the most recent documentary syntheses (2022). Working with a deliberately selective corpus of key monographs, archival editions, and journal articles, the study maps four historiographical moments: Foundational (1837–1918) – romantic–philological texts that name the phenomenon yet normalise it through the terms ţigani and robie. Interwar (1919–1944) – the first large-scale empirical syntheses (Potra, Chelcea) and competing Roma-led associations, documented in police files reproduced by Năstasă and Varga. State-socialist (1945–1989) – a period of partial amnesia, in which slavery is marginalised within grand national narratives but resurfaces in micro-studies (Cicanci, Grigoraș). Post-1989 professionalisation – critical re-examinations spearheaded by Achim, Petcuț, and others, accompanied by substantial archival editions that foreground Romani voices. Across these stages the article analyses (a) terminological slippages that veil slavery (robie vs sclavie, ţigan vs Rom), (b) the impact of foreign observers – from Pierre Lescallopier to Elias Regnault – in framing Romanian slavery as a late European anomaly, and (c) the interplay between nationalist myth-making and external scholarly pressure. I argue that Romani slavery functioned as a fiscal-productive regime integral to Wallachian and Moldavian state formation; its later erasure reflects both elite discomfort with an “un-European” past and the enduring power of racialised language. Integrating this history into university curricula and public memory is therefore essential for a more honest, inclusive understanding of Romanian modernity.
Copyright (c) 2025 Petre Petcuț http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Making the Invisible Visible – Roma in the Programme of European Capitals of Culture: From Marseille 2013 to Timișoara 2023
The programme of Timișoara – European Capital of Culture 2023 included a component on “Deconstructing Stereotypes and Overcoming Marginalization of Roma Communities in Timișoara and Europe”, initiated and coordinated by the Intercultural Institute of Timișoara. This paper presents a comparative analysis of the key features of this component and its background, with the first initiative of this kind, that was part of Marseille-Provence European Capital of Culture 2013. It argues that the way in which cultural and educational activities, aimed at overcoming stereotypes about Roma, are framed, designed, and implemented can, in terms of outcomes, result in big differences. Approaches used to challenge stereotypes in the programme of Timișoara – European Capital of Culture, counterstereotype exposure, and eliciting empathy and perspective-taking are discussed here.
Copyright (c) 2025 Calin Rus http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Revisiting Tools for Change: Reflections on Methodologies and Desire-based Approaches in Roma-related Research
In this article, I revisit some of the main critiques, questions and suggestions in relation to methodological approaches emerging alongside the discipline of Critical Romani Studies. Drawing from Indigenous Studies scholar Eve Tuck’s notion of desire-based research, I apply the three goals that Tuck set to foster emancipatory methodologies as a framework to reflect on the strengths and limitations of previously proposed methodologies in Romanirelated research. By establishing counterhistories of Roma, Romani scholarship, a reconfiguration of the archive, and reflections on critical whiteness as the main topics in the epistemological paradigm shift unfolding over the past decade, I suggest some further points for methodological consideration that could advance the discipline. In particular, I discuss the possibility of co-researching as a mode of participatory knowledge production and propose digital platforms as a potential site of research, as well as call for further reflections on how to make research results more accessible to wider audiences.
Copyright (c) 2025 Sanni Lindroos http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Felix B. Chang and Sunnie T. Rucker- Chang. 2020. Roma Rights and Civil Rights: A Transatlantic Comparison. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Copyright (c) 2025 Eddie Bruce-Jones http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Knowledge Hegemony: Silencing Sexual Violence during Romani Slavery
Romani women were primary targets of the institution of chattel slavery within the Principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia (territories that are mostly part of present-day Romania). However, past and present research has ignored or distorted the distinct experiences of Romani women and the gendered harms they suffered. This article examines historical sources to document systematic forms of sexual violence that Romani women faced during enslavement. Additionally, it employs critical feminist and anti-racist frameworks to study four influential academic texts from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Kogălniceanu 1837; Sion 1915; Potra 1939; Achim 1998) that focused on the institution of slavery and how they approached this topic. Specifically, the article zooms in on how such texts have contributed to silencing and distorting the history of sexual violence and exploitation, while depicting enslaved women as hypersexual objects. The following article contains descriptions of sexual exploitation, sexual violence, and rape perpetrated against Romani women during slavery in Moldavia and Wallachia. These passages may be distressing. Reader discretion is strongly advised.
Copyright (c) 2025 Maria Georgiana Dumitru http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Iulius Rostas. 2019. A Task for Sisyphus: Why Europe’s Roma Policies Fail. Budapest: Central European University Press
Copyright (c) 2025 Dóra Bogárdi http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Marius Căldăraru. 2022. Particularitățile Misiunii Bisericii Ortodoxe Române în Comunitățile Romilor Căldărari [Particularities of the Romanian Orthodox Church's mission in the Căldărar Roma communities]. Bucharest: Bucharest University Press.
This is a review of Marius Căldăraru. 2022. Particularitățile Misiunii Bisericii Ortodoxe Române în Comunitățile Romilor Căldărari [Particularities of the Romanian Orthodox Church's mission in the Căldărar Roma communities]. Bucharest: Bucharest University Press.
Copyright (c) 2025 Cristina http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Copyright (c) 2025 Katya Dunajeva, Marek Szilvasi http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Romani Slavery in Romanian History Textbooks: Between Reparations and Coloniality of Knowledge
This article investigates the depiction of Romani slavery in Romanian history textbooks for years 4, 8, and 12 that were approved by Romania’s Ministry of National Education for the 2023–2024 school year. Using Teun A. van Dijk’s critical discourse analysis framework, the study examines to what extent the Romanian curriculum has been decolonised in the discipline of history or, if on the contrary, it still preserves epistemic power structures as described in Aníbal Quijano’s concept of the colonial matrix of power.
Copyright (c) 2025 Maria Luiza Medeleanu http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Old Blouses, Old Houses: Hauntings of Romani Slavery in the Production of Romanian Nationalism
International organizations often hide under a veil of multiculturalism and inclusivity to enable neoliberal and nationalistic governmentalities in postsocialist Eastern Europe. In the context of UNESCO’s admittance of Romania’s hand-embroidered blouse on its Intangible Cultural Heritage list, I symptomatically read a project coordinated by Eugen Vaida, an influential architect famed for restoring heritage sites in Romania. Vaida’s project engages in a selective erasure of Romani women’s oppression by validating their subaltern’s experience only through their saving of nationalistic elements of the dominant culture. Further, I make conscious the unconscious intentions behind Vaida’s project and behind the ideology of international standards. Through this critique, I address the often-marginalized Eastern European spaces in academia and foreground the history of Romani people’s oppression in Europe.
Copyright (c) 2025 Stefania Cotei http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Darkland, Fairyland, Gypsyland: ‘Gypsy’ Heterotopias and Barthesian Prestidigitation
This article examines myths that have been disseminated through arts and culture about so-called “Gypsies”, confining them to “anti-worlds”. There is always a “glamour that enwraps the Gypsy race” (Sampson 1935a, 10). Romantics and some nineteenth-century writers considered them to be positive symbols of resistance to newly born capitalism and rampant industrialization. This constituted a sort of “légende rose” (Descola 2019, 13), or pink legend, as Philippe Descola put it about Achouars, that is, a very positive gaze upon a people yet labelled “primitive”. However, this article intends to focus on the negative “black legend” (Ibid.), the idea that “Gypsies” form a dark and hostile people belonging to a dark and hostile fantasized territory. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century playwrights first depicted “Gypsies” as thieves, monsters, or inferior beings displaying dubious morality. They were ascribed mysterious powers, and “Gypsy” women were depicted as witches connected to their natural and dangerous territory, an occult Gypsyland. In all cases, they were shown as somewhat uncivilized (Grellman 1787, 24) and primitive beings, very much attached to their own traditions: a figure of the “Orientals within” (Lee 2000, 132). This Gypsylorism – understood here broadly as an orientalism about “Gypsies” – imposed a vision about them, now deeply rooted in the collective consciousness of the gadjos. “Gypsies” of fiction have been created and re-created until they occupy, in the Western imagination, foreign and/or dark territories yet these are situated inside Europe. Surprisingly, they can be found to this day wandering in books and movies, in other spaces or “espaces autres”, and in fetishized beyonds or heterotopias (Foucault 1966, 31). “Gypsy” characters inhabit the margins of the dominant societies of the countries in which they settled centuries ago, as if constantly bringing along with them, in the fantasies of the gadjos, their own frontiers which would isolate them from the rest of the population; or they live in exotic Gypsylands inside the very West. Their assigned territories are “absolutely different”, they are counter spaces, or “contre-espaces” (Foucault 1966, 24), constituting a huge reserve of imagination, “une grande réserve d’imagination” (Foucault 1967, 36). A “Gypsy” para-history thus has been told and written over and over again, “evacuating” (Barthes 2010, 240) the history of Gypsies, and questioning the role of artists and responsibility of social players. This article will also seek to raise the issue of “double consciousness” (Du Bois 1903, 8) among “Gypsy” Travellers.
Copyright (c) 2025 Gaëtan Cognard http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Teaching the History of Romani Slavery: Advancing Justice and Combatting Anti-Roma Racism
This article delves into how the history of the system of slavery in the Romanian Principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia can be taught to advance justice and prevent and combat anti-Roma racism. Although this specific form of racism is prevalent in Europe and beyond, and despite the recognition of history education’s role in fighting racism, the history of Roma slavery is notably absent from European curricula and textbooks. This omission often leads to victim-blaming due to a lack of understanding of Roma’s oppression and marginalisation. However, teaching a traumatic period of history brings dilemmas. Drawing on American slavery education, we discuss both pitfalls and best practices for the teaching of Roma slavery, if the goal is to prevent anti-Roma racism. We highlight four significant steps to effectively teach Roma slavery: (a) emphasise the perspectives, stories, and narratives of the enslaved, (b) provide a balanced account that highlights acts of resistance, resilience, and the agency of enslaved Roma in the face of slavery’s brutality, (c) explicitly connect past injustices to present-day racism, demonstrating the ongoing legacies and impacts of Roma slavery and how the vicious circle can be broken, and finally (d) highlight examples of allyship between Roma and non-Roma, and to provide anti-racist role models for all pupils.
Copyright (c) 2025 Solvor Mjøberg Lauritzen, Alexandru Mihai Zamfir http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Marius Turda. 2024. În căutarea românului perfect. Specific național, degenerare rasială și selecție socială în România modernă [In search of the perfect Romanian. National specificity, racial degeneration, and social selection in modern Romania]. Iași: Polirom.
Copyright (c) 2025 Adrian Nicolae Furtuna http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
The Struggle for Anti-racist Environmental and Housing Justice: A View from a Militant Research Project in Cluj-Napoca, Romania
This article presents the struggle for anti-racist environmental and housing justice in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, and argues for militant research 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 Pata Rât 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 and describes 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 environmental justice 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.
Copyright (c) 2025 Eniko Vincze, George Iulian Zamfir, Vasile Galbea http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Living on Trash: Wasted Identities and Wasted Bodies among Belgrade’s Ashkali and Romani Trash-pickers
Amid global economic restructuring and increasing precarity, more and more people are reusing and reselling discarded commodities. For Ashkali and Romani refugees living in Belgrade’s informal settlements, trash work is essential for survival. Clothing, building materials, and food are all sourced from dumpsters, as is cardboard, plastic, and metal, which are sold to recycling corporations for cash. Trash-picking is not simply an economic strategy; it requires negotiating a complex social, political, and material environment. Following Ashkali and Roma as they collect and recycle trash from city dumpsters, this article argues that waste is not simply a livelihood, or means of survival, but rather a process through which people and places become wasted. Through trash, Ashkali and Roma are consigned to living in substandard settlements, made to assume a series of stigmatized identities, and left vulnerable to the structures of global capitalism, and the debilitation of their bodies.
Copyright (c) 2025 Eirik Saethre http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Slow Violence and Environmental Racism: Romani Recyclers in North Macedonia’s Circular Economy
This article analyses the environmental injustices faced by Romani communities in North Macedonia through case studies of five locations by applying the “slow violence” framework. By examining the long-term and often invisible harm caused by environmental pollution and hazardous working conditions, the paper highlights how Romani waste pickers are disproportionately affected by these slow onset, cumulative forms of violence. Drawing from field visits and secondary sources, it explores the living conditions, financial deprivation, and health issues prevalent in these communities. The analysis reveals that unemployment and inadequate living conditions force Romani families into informal waste recycling as a means of survival. This practice, while providing a necessary income, exposes them to significant health hazards and environmental pollution. The Covid-19 pandemic exacerbated these vulnerabilities, with restrictions limiting access to waste and deepening financial struggles. The study also highlights systemic discrimination and legal challenges faced by Romani waste pickers. By framing these conditions within the concepts of slow violence and environmental racism, the article underscores the long-term consequences of environmental injustice on marginalised communities. The findings call for comprehensive policy approaches that recognise and integrate the contributions of informal waste recyclers into sustainable waste management practices. This research aims to contribute to a deeper understanding of the intersection between environmental sustainability and social justice, advocating for more inclusive policies that address the specific needs and rights of Romani communities.
Copyright (c) 2025 Katya Dunajeva http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Charting New Frontiers in Democracy: A Romani Voice in Parliament
This interview features insights from Ismael Cortés, a scholar who spoke during the Florida Atlantic University (FAU) Summer Abroad Program in Spain, which Carmen Cañete has directed for a decade. In Madrid on 7 July 2022, Cortés delivered a lecture on the portrayal of criminalised Spanish Roma (Gitanos) in the “New Spanish Cinema” of the 1960s, focusing on Mario Camus’ Con el viento solano (1965).[1] The talk sparked discussions on ethnicity, identity, and marginalisation, and the original Spanish version of this exchange was published in O Tchatchipen, a journal from the Romani Institute for Social and Cultural Affairs (IRASC). IRASC, founded by Romani activist Juan de Dios Ramírez Heredia,[2] has long worked for Romani rights in Spain. Cortés returned on 22 July 2024, to discuss the Gitano subaltern figure in Cine Quinqui[3] and further addressed the CEU Romani Studies Program, EU elections, and his ongoing projects, culminating in this bilingual interview.
Copyright (c) 2025 Ismael Cortes, Carmen Cañete Quesada http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
The Romani People: From Enslaved People to Citizens
This is an edited excerpt of an earlier published text: Nicolae Gheorghe. 2006. Roma People: From Enslaved People to Citizens. Bucharest: Amare Rromentza. Translated from Romanian to English by Noémi Fazakas. An essay on the beginnings of civic discourse regarding Romani people in Romanian Principalities and on the significance of abolishing Romani enslavement in the international context of the “European integration” of Romanian Principalities in the mid-nineteenth century.
Copyright (c) 2025 The legal heirs of Nicolea Gheorghe granted Central European University the non-exclusive licence to publish this work. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Reclaiming the Narrative: A Critical Turn in Romani Studies
This article explores the evolution of Romani Studies from a frequently stereotyped field that reified Romani people and fostered several grave misconceptions and biases, such as “Gypsies” are thieves, criminals, or beggars, to a more compounded and interdisciplinary academic field. Initial studies conducted in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries often romanticised and differentiated Romani people. However, from the mid-twentieth century, studies have encompassed a wider range of perspectives and a more critical examination of the experiences of Roma. Today, studies on Roma aim to dispel prejudice while critically analysing their social realities, histories, and cultural heritages. Through activism, policy involvement, and interdisciplinary research, it seeks to advance Romani agency, inclusion, and rights.
Copyright (c) 2025 Diana Aburas http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Legacies of Enslavement: Theatre Review of The Great Shame
In this article, I review The Great Shame, a play by Alina Șerban, a Romanian Romani playwright and actor. My analysis focuses on the central theme of the play, namely the enslavement of Romani people in the historical Romanian Principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia. While telling a contemporary story about academic engagement with the theme of enslavement, the play sheds light on reminiscences of the past in society, particularly institutionalised and interpersonal racist behaviour, censorship, and the perpetuation of stereotypes.
Copyright (c) 2025 Oana Rusu http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
‘Designated Sites’: A Review of the Photography of Valentin Merlin
“Designated Sites” is the expression used by French Travellers to describe the stopping places where they are forced to live by the authorities.[1] In France, there are over 1,200 official caravan sites for French Travellers. The photographer Valentin Merlin travelled around the country to document those places and has photographed over 230 of them since 2015.
Copyright (c) 2025 Lise Foisneau http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0