While Türkiye has entered a post-fertility stage, this demographic shift shows significant internal heterogeneity. Utilizing data from the 2023 Türkiye Roma Population Survey (TRPS-2023) – the first representative sample of its kind – this study delineates the fertility levels and reproductive trajectories of the Roma population from menarche through the fifth parity. The findings reveal a pronounced disparity: the Total Fertility Rate (TFR) among Roma women stands at 2.8, significantly exceeding the national average of 1.7 recorded between 2020 and 2022. Furthermore, the data indicates an accelerated reproductive timeline; Roma women achieve nearly all life-course milestones excluding menarche earlier than the general population. On average, the reproductive life cycle begins at age 14.1, followed by marriage at 17.6 and the transition to first-time motherhood at 19.7. These results suggest that while the broader Turkish population occupies a post-fertility-transition phase, the Roma community remains in the late-fertility-transition stage, highlighting a critical demographic divergence. This article was published open access under a CC BY-NC-ND licence: https://creativecommons.org/licences/by-nc-nd/4.0/.
This article examines the long-term uneven production of environmental and social justice affecting Roma population in the former mining locality of Rudňany, eastern Slovakia. Drawing on qualitative empirical data and archival sources, the study situates contemporary patterns of environmental exposure, socio-spatial segregation, and institutional neglect within a broader historical and political-economic framework. It demonstrates that while socialist-era industrialization and housing policies offered limited forms of social inclusion, they simultaneously reinforced structural inequalities that were subsequently reconfigured and intensified through post-socialist neoliberal and racialized restructuring. The article combines Environmental Justice Theory and Critical Race Theory to elucidate both the mechanisms of unequal exposure to ore mining legacy and the persistent absence of institutional response. The analysis further suggests epistemic asymmetries, showing how Roma experiences are marginalized within official archives and governance practices, rendering environmental degradation in Roma-inhabited areas as normalized rather than to be remedied. By foregrounding the historical embeddedness of Roma marginalization in Rudňany, the article contributes to scholarship by linking environmental harm, historical racialized exclusion, and post-socialist transformation in a single analytical framework. This article was published open access under a CC BY licence: https://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/.
In recent years, issues regarding the use of oral history as a primary source have gained particular significance in Romani Studies. Often, this approach is taken to an extreme, where the value of all other historical sources is dismissed because they were produced by non-Roma, and oral history is proclaimed as the sole means of writing the “true history” of the Roma. In this article, we do not engage in a theoretical debate about the role of oral history in historical research generally or in Romani Studies in particular, as its significance is universally recognized. Instead, we take a different approach. Drawing on two specific case studies – the efforts to establish the so-called Gypsy Autonomy as a distinct territorial-administrative unit in the early USSR, and the portrayal of the Roma situation in Bulgaria within the context of the genocide during the Second World War – the article emphasizes the notable challenges that may arise when oral history materials are used as primary sources and explores the potential of a combined methodological approach. Identifying these issues in specific cases does not imply a rejection of, or an underestimation of, the role of oral history in Romani Studies. On the contrary, its significance as a supplementary source of historical knowledge, and in some cases as a corrective to “documentary” history, remains unquestioned. Nevertheless, this is subject to the requirement that materials obtained through oral history methodologies – like all historical sources – must always undergo critical verification and be systematically compared with other forms of historical evidence. This article was published open access under a CC BY-NC-ND licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.
This article investigates the visual regimes that shaped representations of Roma and Sinti in European photography from the late nineteenth century to the eve of the Second World War. It argues that photography played a decisive role in constructing ethnic and social hierarchies, while simultaneously offering limited but significant spaces for visual self-assertion. Drawing on interwar illustrated newspapers and magazines, the study situates the mass dissemination of stereotypical “Gypsy” imagery within the aesthetic and ideological transformations of photojournalism. Central to the analysis is the concept of “countergaze” – moments in which the photographed subjects disrupted, reinterpreted, or tactically negotiated the asymmetrical gaze of the camera. Through case studies of photographic reportages from different European countries, the article reveals that Roma and Sinti participants were not only passive objects but also active agents on the photographic stage. They staged performances, negotiated payments, and occasionally inverted the photographer’s authority by exaggerating, parodying, or even refusing the expected exoticized roles. These interventions, though constrained by economic and racial hierarchies, fractured the presumed one-way power of representation and exposed the photograph as a space of encounter and contestation. The study reconceptualizes Roma and Sinti photography as both a site of domination and of counter-visual agency. It concludes that the recognition of these “countergazes” not only complicates the historical archive of Roma and Sinti imagery but also points toward new ethical frameworks for re-reading and reclaiming visual histories of marginalized communities. This article was published open access under a CC BY licence: https://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/.
In autoethnographic, critical, and reflective modes, the author – from the perspective of a veteran scholar of Romani communities in Poland – strives here for a measured retrospection vis-à-vis the ongoing decolonialization of Romani studies (a process in which he has been engaged for over half a century). Discerning many a typically colonizing element in the research practices of others as well as himself, he confronts ethical and substantive assessments of such work. At the same time, the author points to a (perhaps subconscious) sustained coloniality among contemporary critics of Romani studies research conducted by early colonizers. This article was published open access under a CC BY licence: https://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/.
This article was published open access under a CC BY-NC-ND licence: https://creativecommons.org/licences/by-nc-nd/4.0/.
The first Romané groups appeared on the Italian peninsula when Humanism was already in full swing. It is therefore natural that humanists were the first intellectuals to expound speculations to their regard. In this paper I try to provide a general overview of the Italian authors who, especially between 1450 and 1550, contributed to such speculations and how they constructed them (sometimes in a different way from what occurred elsewhere). Interpretations on the Cingani that might seem fanciful today can be precisely explained if analysed by taking into consideration the philological conceptions and antiquarian research methods that those great humanists pursued. The insistent search for their “origin” based on biblical, Talmudic, Latin, Greek or Byzantine sources, was part of the general humanistic methodology, but also of the general hermeneutic importance given to genealogical reconstructions regarding persons and peoples to explain the political relationships of dominance and submission in progress or to be pursued. I will try to show how the analogical reasoning implemented was often philologically manipulated in order to demonstrate the preconceived representations from which it came. The astrological and/or cosmographic anthropologies within which theories on the mythical-historical derivation of the Cingani were conceived become authentic moral philosophies used to explain their innate and intrinsic wickedness and abjection. They clarify and justify the expulsion policies of the peninsula’s states, which began at the end of the fifteenth century, reaching their quantitative peak in the mid-sixteenth century. Given the prestige that humanists enjoyed, their words would contribute to the construction of a centuries-old defamation. Even if figuratively, already at the end of the fifteenth century an Italian poet identified the Cingani as a “mala razza” (bad race) and, from this point of view, the article aims to contribute to the history of racist antiziganism/antigypsyism, rather than to the history of the Roma, about whom our authors told us little or nothing. This article was published open access under a CC BY-NC-ND licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.
This article was published open access under a CC BY-NC-ND licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.
This article was published open access under a CC BY licence: https://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/.
This article was published open access under a CC BY-NC-ND licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.
There has been an increasing number of studies on Pentecostal movements among the Roma over the past 15 years, in discrete contexts. Some of these movements have their own theological training for their leaders, such as the French Vie et Lumière and the Iglesia de Filadelfia in Spain. How do discrete groups form their theological education and what role does theological education play in shaping Roma Christianity in their communities and beyond? This paper will first introduce the gradual shift in Protestant theological education, with special emphasis on Pentecostal streams, to engage with the context. Second, this paper will offer two examples – explored through interviews and participant-observation – in order to investigate theological education and its reported impact in Roma churches and communities. First, the Hungarian Gypsy Missions International (HGMI) is an independent mission branch of the Pentecostal church in Hungary that, among their many social, educational, and religious programmes, offers a holistic Community Transformational Missionary Worker Training, which also encompasses theological education. Second, a travelling Roma Bible school, operating both in Southeastern Europe and Germany, is now in its second generation of students and offers a highly contextual model of theology and pedagogy. Despite both trainings being formed “in-house,” engagement with various missionaries and mission organizations contributes to part of the contextual formation This article was published open access under a CC BY licence: https://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/.
The aim of this text is to illustrate how embodied emotions surfacing during fieldwork can be used to inform how non-Romani social scientists understand the Romani religious lifeworlds. The authors analyse the way in which physical expressions of strong emotions are interpreted. In this specific case, similarities which the informants perceived with reference to the bodily reactions of the anthropologists led, in fact, to an intersubjective conviction that deep differences existed between the two sides. The authors argue that the ethnographer’s bodily reactions are, on the one hand, an instrument of anthropological insight into the Romani community under investigation. On the other hand, the ethnographer’s bodily reactions do invoke ethical, methodological, and interpersonal problems This article was published open access under a CC BY licence: https://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/.
After the Second World War in Italy, a growing movement within the Roman Catholic church spearheaded outreach to Romani communities, particularly in light of perceived threats from evangelical Christianity and communism. I focus on how the Italian Women’s Union of Catholic Action (UDACI) and the early clerical leaders of the outreach movement encountered the contradictions and tensions of Catholic “modernity” in their work with Romani populations. The women working within the Catholic hierarchy found themselves doing what they considered to be social work on the ground converting nomadic communities, while butting heads with the paternalistic power structures within the Catholic church. The evangelizing project traces the limits of what Willie James Jennings terms “pedagogical imperialism.” The outreach by the women of UDACI reified a paternalistic approach, since it encouraged the dominant groups to assume they could understand the needs of those they served without really engaging them in deep, meaningful ways that acknowledged their fundamental equality. The long-term repercussions of this approach have been clear in the Catholic church’s continuing struggles to meaningfully engage with Italian Romani communities This article was published open access under a CC BY-NC-ND licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.
This qualitative research, based on a series of interviews (n=7), aims to develop a theoretical framework regarding the role of the church in facilitating education for Roma communities in Cluj-Napoca, a municipality in Romania. The study is grounded in the premise that education is a fundamental factor in the process of social inclusion. Therefore, the church’s involvement in facilitating access to education plays a direct role in the social integration of community members. The primary objective of the research was to investigate how the church contributes to improving educational access for Roma communities in Cluj-Napoca. The results from interviews with Roma experts in Cluj-Napoca suggest that the church is not only a place of worship, but also serves as a key center for non-formal education, significantly influencing the educational and social priorities of the Roma community. It contributes not only to the development of spiritual knowledge but also to the formation of moral and social values that can profoundly transform the perspectives of young Roma and their parents regarding education and their professional futures. This research underscores the church’s role as an agent of social and educational change, highlighting its impact on facilitating education in Cluj-Napoca This article was published open access under a CC BY-ND licence: https://creativecommons.org/licences/by-nd/4.0/.
The following article explores the role of neo-Protestant churches in a small Hungarian town and their entanglement in the complex and intertwining processes of Roma social mobility and social inclusion locally. As structural processes might allow for the increased social mobility of Roma, their social inclusion locally more and more becomes reliant on local institutions which are underfunded. This gap is filled by local neo-Protestant churches in several ways. Even though they are increasingly operated by the logic of ethnic segregation, they appear as institutions that can channel various types of resources into local communities materializing in opportunities, interethnic relations, self-empowerment, mutual aid, and emotional support that ease the burdens of social mobility. Furthermore, they might tackle ethnic stigma by constructing a “pious Roma” locally, who adheres to majoritarian notions of good behaviours, thus fostering social inclusion through changed symbolic meanings. Consequently, this article shows how faith-based organizations can become local actors that mediate the contradictions of social mobility and social inclusion, but parallelly, generate their own This article was published open access under a CC BY-NC-ND licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.
This article was published open access under a CC BY-NC-ND licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.
This article was published open access under a CC BY-NC-ND licence: https://creativecommons.org/licences/by-nc-nd/4.0/.
The aim of this paper is to describe the single party-state’s Gypsy settlement elimination programme in socialist Hungary. In the course of the research, I relied mainly on decrees and reports issued by the local council apparatus as “secret dossiers” and on sociological studies from the period. The ideological background of the communist state’s Gypsy settlement elimination programme, the so-called “CS-housing” programme (CS = reduced comfort level), was as follows: the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party did not recognize the Hungarian Gypsies as a nationality and announced a policy of forced assimilation for them. The assimilation of the Gypsy population was mainly envisaged through the dismantling of their settlements and the dispersal of Gypsies among non-Gypsies. During the nearly two and a half decades of the CS-housing programme, more than 35,000 housing units were allocated, and most of the Gypsy settlements were dismantled. However, new forms of segregation emerged: ghettoized villages and segregated CS-housing settlements. In the last years of the socialist regime, it became clear that the single party-state’s policy of forced assimilation of Gypsies had failed, and that the segregation of Gypsies could not be eliminated, partly due to the failures of the CS-housing programme. Furthermore, some village and town councils prevented the dispersal of the Gypsy settlers among the non-Gypsy population and created “more modern Gypsy settlements” for them. This article was published open access under a CC BY-NC-ND licence: https://creativecommons.org/licences/by-nc-nd/4.0/.
The early eighteenth-century Ottoman state correspondences reference a peripatetic group in Rumelia identified as the “Turcoman Gypsies” (Türkmān Ḳibṭīleri). This group originated from Southern Anatolia and actively engaged with Turkic tribal organizations, notably the Zulkadriyye spin-offs (ifrāz-ı Ẕūlkadriyye). In response to discontent with Ottoman policies that sought to settle mobile populations in the late seventeenth century, they modified their traditional migratory routes. This led to their dispersion across Anatolia and Rumelia. Both state authorities and local communities labelled these groups as Gypsies (Ḳibṭī or Çingene), which assigned them an intersectional identity typically associated with peripatetic communities within the Ottoman Empire. Furthermore, the “Turcoman Gypsies” embraced multiple identities, including Abdal and Turcoman, as well as specific band names such as Çobān, Tarḫāneci, and Baṣdırmacı, reflecting their enduring connections to Turkic tribal organizations. The archival and ethnographic materials examined in the article uncover the historical links between the “Turcoman Gypsies” and other peripatetic groups in the Near East and Crimea, illustrating how they emerged from the segmentation of an ancestral community in Southern Anatolia. This article was published open access under a CC BY licence: https://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/.
This article was published open access under a CC BY-NC-ND licence: https://creativecommons.org/licences/by-nc-nd/4.0/.
