‘Keep your clients because I quit’: An ethnodrama of creolising research with Roma women

Abstract

This chapter presents minor-to-minor epistemological and methodological relations between emerging strands in Romani studies, the Roma co-researchers’ vernacular viewpoints, theories of creolisation emerging from the Caribbean and theatre-based methods. It takes as a starting point a project aimed at ‘empowering’ Southeast European migrant Roma women through low-paid precarious labour and incorporating them into the Finnish cleaning sector, along with critical reflections on my positionality as a non-Roma Romanian mediator of this process and how that raises questions of epistemic violence. Then, together with the co-researchers, we imagine new possible avenues to creolise research based on transversal encounters and conversations across divides and hierarchies with the help of theatre-based methods. The Roma women’s perspectives, presented as lines in a co-created script, provide explanatory theoretical narratives and not just the raw material. Their relational, dynamic and radically subversive vernacular viewpoints theorise social phenomena in and of themselves. The various cracks and tensions that the ethnodrama exposes can be seen as openings from which to disrupt established ways of seeking knowledge and to imagine new possible ways of creolising both inter-subjective and cross-disciplinary dialogues. The chapter concludes with reflections on im/possibilities for co-authorship and what the women’s refusal to be named as co-authors says about the academic writing genre.