Part of a series discussing Romani Chronicles of Covid-19: Testimonies of Harm and Resilience, edited by Paloma Gay y Blasco and Martin Fotta (Berghahn: New York and Oxford, 2023).
On 30 January 2020, the World Health Organization declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) before later announcing the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic on 11 March 2020.[1] These exceptional circumstances urged governments to implement specific public health measures, such as social distancing, to mitigate the spread of the coronavirus. We have heard several inspiring stories regarding how people shared their devastating experience of facing Covid -19 and helped each other with information, food, and medicine. While most societies demonstrated solidarity with families who lost their loved ones or with essential workers like health workers, the pandemic intensified existing institutional racism against racialized groups, such as Roma people in Europe and beyond. Moreover, in the fever of social distancing, some segregated communities became further blockaded – mentally, socially, and politically – in their “open prison” compared to before the outbreak of pandemic. Human rights organizations, Romani, and pro-Romani activists published numerous reports, op-eds, and statements to raise awareness about the horrendous negligence and human rights violations being committed by state authorities against Roma communities (for example ERRC 2020; FRA 2020).
Anthropologists Paloma Gay Blasco and Martin Fotta have caringly prepared a pathbreaking, edited volume that advances our understanding of the significance and impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on Romani people in five countries (Spain, Brazil, Slovakia, Poland, and Czech Republic) during the period of 2020 and 2021. As they detail in the volume, twenty-four of these chroniclers are Romani while thirteen are non-Romani; all are multifariously positioned to provide firsthand information about the devastating effect of the pandemic. As “affected individuals, NGO workers, health practitioners, policy makers, community mediators, activists and academics living and working among and alongside Romani communities,” they have also been witnesses (1). This multiplicity of countries and variety of voices form the basic architecture of this book, a factor that not only serves the structure but also the dialogical character of the edited volume in which contributors are addressing and rejoining each other while additionally representing a particular position and set of values. As the authors succinctly state in their introduction: “We take [ the COVID-19 pandemic] as our starting point the awareness that experience can be at once forceful and elusive, that it cannot always be adequately captured or analyzed, and that academic concepts and approaches are not always adequate or sufficient for this task” (3). Furthermore, they straightforwardly explain that this volume also offers a space for those contributors whose work is omitted as “non-academic, non-analytical, or non-rigorous” (3).
Romani Chronicles of COVID-19 is divided into five sections based on the above-mentioned countries’ chronicles. Each section has several chapters including an introduction which provides a thematic and conceptual overview of the country-specific part of the volume. The volume presents the evolvement and impact of the COVID-19 pandemic within Roma communities as time-bounding chronicles documented by those who are witnessed and affected. These chapters are written through a complex lens that not only displays the temporary crisis intensified by the pandemic but also incorporates the underlying entrenched and normalized, structural inequalities. Furthermore, they unapologetically weave together the personal and emotional with collective, institutional, and structural stories that have not yet been captured. Chroniclers use several styles such as memoir, fiction, reflexive fieldnotes, and personal journaling alongside scholarly analysis of the dreadful situation. This array of diversity guarantees the comfort for both academics and non-scholarly authors to articulate their complex knowledge and traumatized experience in ways that are granular and highly sensitive. The Romani Chronicles of COVID-19 is not only a historical artifact about how Roma communities have faced the pandemic and, ultimately, been sacrificed to it, but also generates the opportunity to use new methods and approaches to create an innovative path for collaborative and inclusive knowledge production.
Reading this book lent me the consolation of experiencing a long-awaited academic intervention to moderately rectify epistemic injustice in academic knowledge production. Paloma Gay Blasco and Martin Fotta have proven to have the courage to be bravely reflexive, bold, and imaginary enough to challenge traditional research patterns by including and elevating the voices of those who are usually the undervalued, invisible interlocutors. A few years ago, it would have been unthinkable to express the following, honest reflection: “ [T]he two of us are non-Romani academics….Throughout our careers we have attempted to bring to light the mechanisms through which our Romani interlocutors build meaningful lives in the context of continued social marginalization. Increasingly, we are becoming aware of some of the ways in which our work itself may strengthen the very inequalities that we hope to uncover” (4).
It can be said that the COVID-19 pandemic also created a social rupture to challenge epistemic violence in academia and facilitated the inclusion of Roma in knowledge production. In her seminal work on epistemic injustice, Miranda Fricker (2007) distinguishes between testimonial and hermeneutic injustice. Testimonial injustice occurs when the speaker is not understood properly because the hearer has a lack of trust based on prejudice that hinders any kind of meaningful understanding. Hermeneutical injustice occurs when speakers cannot find the words, thoughts, and concepts that would describe their collective experience because the available (biased) conceptual resource constitutes the structural prejudice present in the academic conceptual framework. This innovative volume by Paloma Gay Blasco and Martin Fotta cuts across the node of epistemic injustice by bringing Roma voices into a credited, academic volume where they can dialogue, co-theorize, and provide a collaborative understanding of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on Roma communities. Paradoxically, this public health crisis has brought an epistemological and methodological innovation in Roma-related studies.
[1] https://www.who.int/europe/emergencies/situations/covid-19
References
European Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA). 2020. Implications of COVID-19 pandemic on Roma and Travellers communities, https://fra.europa.eu/en/country-data/2020/implications-covid-19-pandemic-roma-and-travellers-communities, accessed 7 Feb. 2024.
European Roma Rights Center (ERRC). 2020. Coronavirus: NGOs Warn Against Roma Exclusion from EU Crisis Response, http://www.errc.org/news/coronavirus-ngos-warn-against-roma-exclusion-from-eu-crisis-response, accessed 7 Feb. 2024.
Fricker, Miranda. 2007. Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing, Oxford University Press.
