Open Seminar with Sunnie Rucker-Chang

AATSEEL 2021 Open Seminar with Sunnie Rucker-Chang

Scholars of Romani Studies, and more recently Critical Romani Studies, address the positions, cultures, structural inequities of and knowledge production about Romani populations. In this seminar, I draw from my recently published book, Roma Rights and Civil Rights: A Transatlantic Perspective, to engage with how Critical Romani Studies explores the scope and construction of minoritized European Romani populations and cultures to highlight how issues of racialized hierarchies and failed inclusion strategies surface in Central and Southeast European films by and about Roma. Specific questions I will address in this seminar include: How can we apply foundational frameworks of Critical Romani Studies to films from our region?; Who are some of the Romani scholars contributing to knowledge production in Romani Studies?; What are the familiar strategies of representation and self-representation of Roma in film?; And how can we use these films in our classrooms to expand our curricula to be more inclusive and representative of the peoples and cultures among the geographies included in Slavic and East European Studies? The conversations that I hope to spark intersect well with the current focus of online webinars, symposia, and stand-alone talks addressing how scholars and students of Slavic and East European Studies can incorporate diverse subject matters into their classrooms and scholarship. As such, I look forward to advancing these dialogues and engaging with like-minded scholars.