Covid-19 and Romani communities: developing innovative collaborations

Dr Paloma Gay y Blasco is very interested in how to create dialogues between scholarship and the wider community, generating outputs that are both accessible and of scholarly relevance.

She is currently working collaboratively with Spanish Roma women documenting the various kinds of violence that they experience, to find ways to improve how state institutions and service providers meet their needs particularly now in the context of the pandemic. This work builds on the long-term collaboration between Paloma and Liria de la Cruz, the first Romani woman to receive an honorary degree by the University of St Andrews, which led to the recent publication of their co-authored book 'Writing Friendship'.

Paloma is also leading a large project, together with Dr Martin Fotta from the Czech Academy of Sciences, that aims to chronicle Romani experiences during Covid-19 across five countries in Europe and the Americas. This project brings together the voices of 50 collaborators, from health workers to community mediators, policy makers to street vendors and housewives. This builds on earlier collaborative work carried out by Paloma on Covid-19 with Romani health expert María Félix Rodriguez in March 2020, to alert to the effects of the pandemic on Romani communities.

Also with Dr Martin Fotta, Paloma is working to identify how the Covid-19 pandemic is changing research methods, in particular for younger academics working with Romani communities. They have organised this workshop to enable younger academics to reflect on the methodological challenges of the pandemic.