This second edition of the Summer Campus on Romani Studies has two objectives:
1. Propose and develop areas of research and education correlated with areas of interests and predilections of the University in an interdisciplinary approach;
2. Continue the dynamic developed during the first edition of stimulation and development of a centre of excellence in the field of reflection and international academic research, empowering and giving visibility to Roma academics and researchers. It would therefore consist in providing visibility and presenting the Romani potentia and episteme, from the excellence and rigor that all scientific approaches require. This assumption does no arise from a spirit of community decline but the need to empower and to inform the Romani scientific voices, which suffer research and teaching marginalization.
This year, the scientific committee of the Summer Campus on Romani Studies focuses on:
"Minority knowledge", education, and schooling of Roma. The Romani episteme serving regional, national, and European policies. New research perspectives.
From "Minority and education: the Tsigane path", the work of Jean Pierre Liegeois published in 1998, one questions the Romani education paradigm, whether academic or socio-ethnic. The view of experts, institutions, and scientists of education is self-centred and often pays little attention to the wealth of minority knowledge, its learning dynamics, the importance of key concepts as the holistic nature of Romani society and the predominant role of the family, as the basic unit of social, economic, and educational organization. Moreover, in a globalized, majority European society where schooling and education are wholly confused, where parents expect educational institutions to educate their children, the current distance in the Romani society between schooling and education is often misinterpreted by institutional leaders of the "education system". Ivan Illich opposed science for the people, which is taught in schools, to science by the people, who remain to be invented and it is urgent to reinvent.
The Romani paradigm as regards education is rich and complex. It is often and incorrectly assumed that the Romani culture is free from cognitive conceptualization, that the community decline implies the rejection of all major educational structures. Roma are not and have never been out of the world. The catastrophic, humiliating, and degrading economic and social situation in which part of the Roma people develops today, identity crises, nationalism and the rise of Gypsophobia annihilate the Romani potentia and its minority expertise. However, there is a positive reverse to this sad reality. Every year, more and more young Roma and Romnia successfully complete their higher education or university studies to turn to research and / or teaching.
While the majority societies involving Roma offer reducing pedagogical models (for their global, consensual, and politically correct nature), or destabilizing and completely segregated ones (supposedly friendly with the ethnic characteristics which are none other than buildings outside), we demand ourselves: what is the place of the Romani episteme in this education and schooling paradigm? What are the endogenous and exogenous relations held by the Roma with the knowledge, skills, education, and schooling?
The 2013 edition of the Summer Campus on Romani Studies Romani will propose ways of thinking and teaching delivered by Roma professors and researchers focused on 3 concepts:
1. Self-knowledge, recognition of the other. Educational tools and extra-educational strategies for an interpenetration between minority Romani knowledge and majority educational systems;
2. Do science and the majority knowledge hold a monopoly on the development of intelligibility tools for the "educational thing"?
3. Gender, knowledge, and education.