A few months ago, the Junior Professorship of Insecurity and Social Order at the University of the Bundeswehr Munich had reason to celebrate: Timothy Williams' proposal for the funding call by the Federal Anti-Discrimination Agency for research on discrimination against Sinti and Rom has been granted! The project is titled "Discrimination and Resilience. Memory and Continuities among Roma (DiREKt-Roma)" and focuses on a long period of experiences of discrimination faced by Roma and the ways these are dealt with, both at an individual and community level.
The project aims to collect data through life history interviews and subsequent thematic in-depth interviews to explore the experiences of discrimination and violence among Roma, as well as their strategies of resilience and resistance. Different groups of Roma with and without migration experiences will be interviewed to reveal complex interconnections of discriminations and to enable the tracing of continuities over time (including along migration histories). A comparative perspective is chosen to develop insights into discrimination, violence, and individual and collective ways of dealing with them. This detailed examination of the interconnections and continuities of discrimination and resilience allows for nuanced findings, aiming to strengthen resilience within the community and support prevention efforts.
To ensure the project's rootedness in the community and its outcomes, it was designed in collaboration with the Landesrat der Roma NRW (State Council of Roma in North Rhine-Westphalia) and some of its member organizations, adopting a participatory action approach. Interviewers from the Roma community are being trained for data collection and analysis.
For about a month now, the Junior Professorship has been working on the new project. The kick-off proceeded swiftly, with successful workshops conducted to train interviewers within the Roma community in North Rhine-Westphalia. The first interviews within the project have already taken place. Following such a start, we can confidently say that we look forward to further collaboration with the interviewers and our project partner, the Landesrat der Roma NRW, and we are eagerly anticipating the next workshop, where we will collectively analyse the life history interviews!
Further information available here.
