On the other hand, on the dimension of knowledge production, the prominent place of Romani intellectuals in the ERIAC spurred another set of debates. There is a discernible shift in what some scholars call the “Roma Awakening”: the increasing strength of Romani actors’ voices in multiplying debates concerning Roma lives, including on practices within academia itself (Acton and Ryder 2015). Institutionally, this veritable critical turn was marked, in the summer of 2017, by the launch of the Romani Studies Program at Central European University, led by two prominent Romani scholars, and by the establishment of its journal, Critical Romani Studies. The growing numbers of Romani scholars and the way they disrupt, with increasing visibility, the narratives produced by the established core of Romani studies scholars have already started to influence academic debates by eliciting reactions (see, for instance, Stewart 2017). Partly, the current volume speaks to this shift, identifying those dynamics through which Romani academics contribute to renewing scholarship by unsettling not only discourses, but also the power mechanisms and structures underlying them. This move echoes the critique of epistemic privilege and the paramount emphasis on decolonizing anthropology (Harrison 1991), or methodologies of research with subaltern peoples more generally (Tuhiwai-Smith 1999).
The project of the ERIAC has received criticism from scholars pertaining to the EANRS, too, on basis of concerns related to the lack of legitimacy of knowledge produced outside established university and research structures, which derive their legitimacy from quality control protocols defined as scientific. The opponents of these arguments have deemed this position conservative and scientist, critiquing it for being oblivious to issues of power and epistemic privilege. Yet their arguments have often resorted to ethnic essentialism or “epistemological insiderism” (Brubaker 2016): the belief that one’s perceived identity may function as to (dis)qualify the production of knowledge on particular topics from external positions. In the subtext of claims that Roma scholars are uniquely legitimate producers of knowledge on the Roma looms large the contestable idea that non-Roma scholars are less able—and in any case less legitimized—to do so, because of their “outsider” status (see also Stewart 2017). Both views construct and reify borders and the things they separate: the first between various forms and institutions of knowledge production (scientific versus nonscientific), and the second between particular identity formations seen as rigid and essential ethnic units (Roma versus non-Roma). A missing stance in this rather chunky, unsophisticated debate is what Rogers Brubaker (2016: 10) coins “a trans of beyond”: “positioning oneself in a space that is not defined with reference to established categories. Such a move is characterized by the claim to transcend existing categories—or to transcend categorization altogether.” The question of whether, and how, such a “trans” moment is possible in Romani-related scholarship and activism seems a timely one.
If “Romani studies” as a general topic area has been known to vest forms of scientific racism in the Gypsy Lore Society (Acton 2016), more recently, many scholars have taken up an active role in combating, through their knowledge, stereotypes against Romani groups (Tremlett 2009). But the growing interest in “the Roma” from outside Romani studies has subsequently delocalized knowledge production toward research institutions that do not necessarily have an ethnic focus. As a result, there has been an explosion of analyses of various facets of Romani lived experiences. Stewart (2013) renders an account of contemporary tendencies in Roma-related anthropological research, but the ever-increasing corpus of literature stemming from political science, cultural studies, geography, sociology, or international relations has not been structured in a similar account, and would be a near-impossible task to undertake, given the current prolific production of Roma-related research. The last decade in particular has seen the massive expansion of policy-oriented and applied research on the Roma, with major stakeholders such as the World Bank, the European Commission, or the United Nations Development Program commissioning research aimed at understanding the challenges Roma face in different contexts in order to justify various policy responses. Smaller organizations have also profited from the funds thus made available for applied, policy-oriented research. Often, the authors of these reports pendulate between institutions carrying out research—be they purely academic, looser networks of advocacy think-tanks, or smaller but “professionalized” NGOs. Some of them declare themselves activists, while others claim a more neutral stance; but the knowledge they produce is shaped in crucial ways—to our sense not fully explored yet—by their position at the crossroads between academic, activist, and policy trajectories. Importantly, the knowledge thus generated is molded by the ways in which funds are made available for the production of specific types of discourses grounded in particular visions of the Roma as a population in need of intervention (Timmer 2010; Schneeweis 2014; see also Ivasiuc, this volume).
With funds made available for Roma-related research from the policy sector, there has been an undeniable “inflation of expertise,” which, understandably, regularly raises concerns of quality (Matras 2015). 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”