Roma Future Studies

We make the Roma relevant in the futures being written: democratic, feminist, algorithmic, ecological.

The futures of Europe are being drafted now, in policy, in code, in curriculum, in capital. The Roma are absent from almost every draft. The absence is not an oversight. It is the continuation of five centuries of editing.

We teach the history first. The whole history. Six centuries of slavery in the Romanian principalities. The Roma Holocaust that murdered half a million Roma under the Nazi regime and was named at the European level only in 1982. The cultural genealogy of Roma painting, literature, music, theatre, film and thought, that runs alongside it. A young Roma person aged fourteen to twenty-four in this region can grow up without meeting any of it. We write it down, we exhibit it, we put it in schools. A generation that has met its own history can build a future on it.

The gap inside the field is the one least often named. Roma women, feminists and queer Roma carry exclusion three times over, by race, by gender, by sexuality, and a fourth time inside the Roma movement itself, where their authorship is muted to protect a single message. The voices first silenced are theirs. We refuse the silencing. Women shall hold the decisions and the budgets, not only the labour.

Roma communities have always imagined futures the majority could not yet see. That imagination is our gift to Europe.