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/.
