This event is part of the RECET Festival of Historical and Social Sciences "Migration & Transformation".
Event venue: Campus of the University of Vienna („Altes AKH“), festival tent in Hof 1
Position of the tent: https://goo.gl/maps/8FjYQNtdnaUiKCcs6
Carol Silverman and Mirjam Karoly will discuss how Roma, Europe's largest ethnic minority of approximately 12 million, illuminate the themes of migration, transformation, and resilience. Who are Roma and why is their history relevant today? One of Europe's historical "others," who suffered slavery in Romania and genocide in the Holocaust, Roma have been formulaically represented by non-Roma for a thousand years via the vagrant, criminal and romantic stereotypes. We will examine how the supposedly "nomadic Gypsy" contrasts with reality by investigating historical patterns of exile as well as current expulsions and exclusions of Romani communities in their homelands. Since 1989 thousands of Roma have emigrated westward due to deteriorating living conditions in Eastern Europe; as a result, fears of "Gypsy hordes" are being revived. In the current heightened atmosphere of neo-nationalism and xenophobia, how are Romani communities, including migrants resisting exclusion, documenting their history, and preserving their culture and identity?
The panel will be moderated by Zsófia Lóránd (RECET/University of Vienna).
Mirjam Karoly is a political scientist. From 2013-2017, she was head of the OSCE Contact Point for Roma and Sinti Issues at the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights in Warsaw. Previously, she served as Senior Adviser on Minority Rights at the OSCE Field Operation in Kosovo. She focuses on Roma in Europe, the situation of minorities and Roma displaced persons in conflict and post-conflict situations. She is an advocate for Roma rights and a member of the Austrian Delegation to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. She also serves as a member of the Austrian Ethnic Council on Roma and is an honorary member of Romano Centro. Currently she is office manager at the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies (VWI).
Carol Silverman has been involved with Romani culture for over forty years as a researcher, teacher, performer, and activist. An award-winning Professor Emerita of Cultural Anthropology and Folklore at the University of Oregon, she focuses on music, migration, cultural policy, and human rights issues among Roma. Based on fieldwork in the Balkans, New York, and Western Europe, her numerous articles analyze the relationship among music, politics, ritual and gender via analyses of representation and appropriation. Her 2012 book Romani Routes: Cultural Politics and Balkan Music in Diaspora (Oxford), won the book prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology, and her 2021 book Balkanology (Bloomsbury) traces the politics of Bulgarian wedding music. She works with the US NGO Voice of Roma, is curator for Balkan music for international digital RomArchive.eu, is a professional vocalist and teacher of Balkan music, and was recently elected to the Barvalipe Academy of the European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture (ERIAC).
Zsófia Lóránd is Assistant Professor at the Department of Contemporary History and RECET at the University of Vienna. Earlier, she was a Marie Curie Fellow at the Faculty of History and Wolfson College at the University of Cambridge, and held positions at the European University Institute in Florence and the Lichtenberg-Kolleg of the University of Göttingen. Her book, The Feminist Challenge to the Socialist State in Yugoslavia focusing on the intellectual history of feminism in the 1970s and 1980s was published in 2018 and got translated into Croatian in 2020. Currently, she is working as PI on her ERC-funded project HERESSEE “The History of Feminist Political Thought and Women’s Rights Discourses in East Central Europe 1929 – 2001”.
