PENDARIPEN (“history”, in Romani) is a multidisciplinary research team, funded by the National Spanish Research Program (HAR2015-64744-P), and defined by its strong commitment to the emancipating power of History, understood both as a scientific knowledge and as a social lore. It is an endeavour shared by Historians, Anthropologists, Linguists, and Media and Cultural Studies experts, even though its core is mainly historiographical: we do believe that a plural and unbiased History will provide us with the critical insight and the adequate narrative to tackle this challenge successfully.
We will study Romani History in a wide chronology, starting from the XVIIIth up to the XXth century, and considering a transnational framework. It is in our aim to make use of the categories provided the Cultural History of Politics, Critical Discourse Analysis and the History of Emotions as theoretical approaches, and we will deal with interviews and life histories as necessary methodologies to be combined with the more classical –albeit essential– archival research. Our purpose is to link together the Romani case studies with other researches devoted to issues like the identities construction, the exclusion process, the demands for political rights, the migration movements and the historic circumstances of other minorities.
The alterity images produced by the modern Western culture, throughout the historical process by means of which the majority societies were consolidated, has condemned to marginalization minorities groups, such as Roma people, frequently targeted as “internal enemies”. These representations of the “Otherness”, which had contributed to distort and misrepresent the reality, must be substituted for a scientific social knowledge understanding able to recover the plurality and restore the dignity of the Romani people.
More info → https://paradojas.hypotheses.org/category/entradas