Deadline: August 30, 2025
Proposed title: Contested pasts and enduring injustices: New debates in Romani studies
Romani Studies scholars have recently scrutinized the field’s epistemology and Western paradigms, the lasting effect of structures and inequalities that transcend governmental change, the effect of integration policies and environmental racism, and the ethical imperatives of scholarly engagement with these issues. This thematic cluster invites contributions that critically engage with the newest emerging debates in Romani Studies that interrogate structures of power, racialization, and systemic exclusion in Central and Eastern Europe.
Guest editors:
Delia Popescu, Le Moyne College, US, popescd@lemoyne.edu
Lavinia Stan, St. Francis Xavier University, Canada, lstan@stfx.ca
Format:
We invite submissions for a cluster that will include five research articles authored by established scholars and three articles authored by emerging scholars recruited from among those who will respond to a call posted on the EEPS website and distributed widely through other venues.
Rationale:
Despite decades of policy reform and international attention, Romani communities across Central and Eastern Europe remain disproportionately marginalized. Enduring discrimination is shaped by long-standing attitudes and policies coupled with post-socialist transformations, wherein neoliberal restructuring, democratic backsliding, institutional weakening, and ethno-nationalist politics have sustained social, political, and spatial inequalities. The daily realities of Romani communities reflect entrenched patterns of racial capitalism, environmental injustice, and institutional neglect. These injustices are epistemological because structural gaps in collective interpretive resources render Romani social experiences unintelligible or illegible within dominant epistemologies (Fricker, 2007; Dotson, 2011). In this context, the systematic exclusion of Romani voices from both governance and social engagement reflects a selective approach to the creation of national historical records.
This cluster of new research trends foregrounds critical debates within Romani Studies that have emerged in response to persistent injustices. From the resurgence of genetic essentialism in scientific discourse to the environmental degradation of Romani settlements, to the backlash against the Roma because some EU mandated and EU funded Roma support programs failed to achieve their goals, and the tokenization of Romani identity through poorly implemented “integration” policies—these topics demand urgent scholarly attention and political accountability. Romani communities are not passive recipients of marginalization policies. Across Europe, they are mobilized to contest injustice, build solidarity, and reshape political discourse. Yet even within these movements, gendered and classed hierarchies often persist. As debates about who speaks for Roma, how knowledge about Roma is produced, how Roma are represented in mainstream media, and what counts as legitimate research intensify, this special section aims to center contributions that engage these considerations.
Submissions that draw on interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary perspectives—including sociology, environmental justice, critical race theory, gender studies, anthropology, history, and political science—are welcome. We particularly encourage contributions from Romani scholars and activists, as well as those that involve collaboration with Romani communities.
Case studies, comparative analyses, and theoretical explorations are all invited. Topics should focus on Central and Eastern Europe and may include, but are not limited to:
Environmental racism and spatial segregation of Romani settlements Critical assessments of Romani representation across fields, including academia Epistemic violence and the reproduction of racialized knowledge on Roma Media representation of Roma groups, identities and concerns The impact of genetic discourses and racial science on Roma identity and policy Racial capitalism and post-socialist labor and housing precarity Community-led methodologies and decolonial practices in Romani scholarship Gendered dimensions of Romani marginalization within and outside Roma movements Transitional justice reckoning with past injustices and new memory dynamics
The cluster will include novel approaches to Critical Romani Studies on the under-explored topics listed above. It will showcase not only recent scholarship in the field, but it will also identify in the introduction what we believe are the gaps in knowledge that need further investigation. One of its main strengths is to bring together established and emerging scholars who belong to the Romani community or examine these topics from outside of it.
Schedule: The schedule is designed so that authors have around 10 months to write their full contributions.
June 2025 – sending out invitations to selected contributors and publishing the call on the EEPS website 30 August 2025 – submission of abstracts and short bios; selection of contributions by emerging scholars; notification of authors 1 June 2026 – submission of full manuscripts July-October 2026 – reviewing and revision of manuscripts November 2026 – writing and submitting the introductory article; electronic publication
Submission instructions: Please send the abstracts and the short bios to the editors as email attachments.