Boyash Studies Researching Our People

The Boyash, also known as Rudari, Lingurari or, inclusively, as “oamenii noștri” (our people), are an ethnic group living today in scattered communities in the Balkans, Central and Eastern Europe, but also in the Americas. What brings the disperse communities of Boyash together is their Romanian mother tongue, (memory of) traditional occupation, common historical origin, and the fact that the majority population considers them Gypsies / Roma. A marginal topic until now, at the crossroads between Romani and Romanian studies, the Boyash studies are today an interdisciplinary field dealing with the experiences of the Boyash over time, in Romania and all the places where they have settled. The editors of this volume intend to mark two centuries of scholarly interest in the Boyash by bringing together researchers from different fields, summing up existing literature and bringing new research to the forefront.

Rudari Lingurari families, one of many significant minority groups in southeastern Europe, have been characterized by mobility since the end of the 19th century, from voluntary border crossings to deportations and forced relocations. Other Borders draws from participatory, multi-site ethnographic research to explore rudari families’ cultural and relational frames of mobility through their social and economic organization. Sabrina Tosi Cambini develops the concept of a “moving gaze” to more effectively explore rudari migration paths across multiple countries, their occupation of unoccupied buildings in Italy, their housing practices in both Italy and Romania, and the movement of their objects, ideas, and imaginaries.

The life stories of Roma Pentecostals in Croatia and Serbia reveal both significant hardship and resilience, which notably impacts how they incorporate a Pentecostal identity and the ways in which they transform their daily lives in accordance with Pentecostal theology.

Conference Proceedings of 4th International Conference on Tourism Research

This multi-authored monograph, located in the intersection of translanguaging research and Romani studies, offers a state-of-the-art analysis of the ways in which translanguaging supports bilingual Roma students’ learning in monolingual school systems. Complete with a video repository of translanguaging classroom moments, this comprehensive study is based on long-term participatory ethnographic research and a pedagogical implementation project undertaken in Hungary and Slovakia by a group of primary teachers, bilingual Roma participants, and researchers. Co-written by academic and non-academic participants, the book is an essential reading for researchers, pre- and in-service teachers of Romani-speaking students, and experts working with collaborators (learners, informants, activists) whose home languages are excluded from mainstream education and school curricula. The videofiles in the book are available via the following website: http://www.kre.hu/romanitranslanguaging/index.php/video-repository/

This volume probes into the mechanisms of how languages are created, legitimized, maintained, or destroyed in the service of the extant nation-states across Central Europe. Through chapters from contributors in North America, Europe, and Asia, the book offers an interdisciplinary introduction to the rise of the ethnolinguistic nation-state during the past century as the sole legitimate model of statehood in today’s Central Europe. The collection’s focus is on the last three decades, namely the postcommunist period, taking into consideration the effects of the recent rise of cyberspace and the resulting radical forms of populism across contemporary Central Europe. It analyzes languages and their uses not as given by history, nature, or deity but as constructs produced, changed, maintained, and abandoned by humans and their groups. In this way, the volume contributes saliently to the store of knowledge on the latest social (sociolinguistic) and political history of the region’s languages, including their functioning in respective national polities and on the internet. Languages and Nationalism Instead of Empires is a compelling resource for historians, linguists, and political scientists who work on Central and Eastern Europe.

This volume investigates the complex relationship between language and identity of the peoples speaking Romance languages in the Balkans, offering a thorough sociolinguistic and anthropological account on this crossroads region.