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, research, and policy, with a marked emphasis on the latter. She emphasizes the need for pragmatism in channeling change through the institutional paths of policy-making, with clear rules defining which types of knowledge are relevant to policy makers and which are likely to be shelved as irrelevant. Greenfields uses quantitative data provided by the EANRS on its membership composition to show the unmistakable underrepresentation of policy as an area of expertise among researchers dealing with Roma issues. Noting the increase—in both demand and supply—of policy reports and advice on Roma-related issues throughout Europe, she suggests that although scholars are involved in significant numbers in providing policy consultancy to various national and transnational bodies, many of them lack the training, experience, and insights into the policy-making machinery that would enhance the chances of their knowledge to be incorporated effectively into successful measures. She suggests that activist scholars should become familiar with policy environments in order to “translate their research into policy outcomes,” and that the constraints of the policy-making process should be taken into account when imparting policy advice. While she acknowledges that pertinent criticism to policy-making has been formulated both within the anthropology of policy literature and by Romani studies scholars, she advocates for a pragmatic, closer association between activist research and policy-making, specifically on the latter’s terms. Greenfields argues that there is a gap between academics and policy makers and contends that scholars can bridge this gap not only by attuning their recommendations to the requirements of policy makers in terms of theoretical models, terminology, and pragmatism, but also by attending to the “packaging” of their knowledge, for instance by refraining from expressing “too great a criticism of the administrative regime’s actions,” and also by using clear tools to showcase their recommendations, such as case studies. Greenfields makes the case for confronting policy makers with the concrete problems encountered by their “end-users,” and provides a telling example of how she involved Gypsy and Traveller activists, as well as homeless activists, in a training she organized with policy makers in the United Kingdom, in which knowledge was coproduced and policy makers were practically confronted with the issues they had to solve through policy. Finally, advocating for “practice-based approaches to critical thinking” in policy advice, Greenfields warns against the dangers of “overthinking” and complexifying beyond measure the knowledge presented to policy makers, arguing that such approaches are likely to stall intervention or reduce it to substandard practice, and that the ethical choice of activist researchers should ultimately lie in opting for what “works” in policy toward the practical improvement of the living circumstances of its “end-users.”