Watch the YouTube livestream below:

Date and Time: Friday, April 5, 2024 at 1:00pm – 6:30pm EDT. Reception to follow at 6:30pm.

Location: 110 Thompson Room, Barker Center, 12 Quincy St, Cambridge MA 02138 (Harvard University) and online

Conference Overview:

In partnership with the Romani Studies Program at Central European University, the Palestine Program for Health and Human Rights, the Center on Forced Displacement at Boston University, the Center for Human Rights and International Justice, History and Music Departments at the Morrissey College of Arts and Sciences at Boston College, the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, the Harvard University Committee on Ethnicity, Migration, Rights (EMR), and the Human Rights Program at Harvard Law School, the Roma Program at the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights will host a free, hybrid format conference at Harvard University’s Barker Center (110 Thompson Room) on Friday, April 5, 2024. The Barker Center is located at 12 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA, 02138. It is accessible by public transportation and near several garages but there is no parking on site. A reception will follow.

The annual Roma conference at Harvard has been established as a forum for presenting research and discussion concerning anti-Roma racism, its genesis, history, pillars, and manifestations. It seeks to advance the collection of Roma-related data and the improvement of research methods and practice-oriented research to inform the development of histories, policies, and practices centered on the Roma people. The Harvard Roma conference also seeks to place and co-center the Roma people in global conversations on anti-racism, justice-based policies and laws, and solidarity.

The 2024 conference is the 12th to take place at Harvard. Titled Confronting State Violence across the Globe, it will foster cross-border and interdisciplinary dialogues and examination of state violence. It will identify pathways for enacting reforms in law, policy, and practice that center on justice, intersectional, and anti-racism principles. The conference has a dual focus:

Firstly, it aims to interrogate the genesis and sources of power and the mechanisms and manifestations of state violence experienced by racialized communities across the world. Secondly, it will endeavor to unpack the concept of “ungrievable lives,” the narratives of the Other, the Oriental, or the Oriental within, and the politics of death that validate state-sponsored violence and injustices. As Judith Butler says in Frames of War, “An ungrievable life is one that cannot be mourned because it has never lived, that is, it has never counted as a life at all. We can see the division of the globe into grievable and ungrievable lives from the perspective of those who wage war in order to defend the lives of certain communities and to defend them against the lives of others—even if it means taking those latter lives.”

Background Information About International Roma Day (April 8)

Romani people worldwide have celebrated International Roma Day on April 8 for decades. This year will mark the 53rd anniversary of the First World Roma Congress, a historic moment when Roma Day, the flag, and the anthem were adopted. Some have turned the anniversary into a one-day opportunity to discuss their rich heritage through concerts, exhibitions, film screenings, conferences, and media events. Others, including activists and academics, have marked International Roma Day by organizing remembrance events to take stock of continuing racism and progress in social, political, cultural, and economic fields.

This April 8, we mark International Roma Day with the 12th Harvard Roma conference. We will use this critical moment to reflect on the recent racialized history of Roma people and contemporary obstacles and threats to Roma’s health and well-being, setting these within a broader comparative context.

Agenda

12:30pm – 1:00pm: Gathering

1:00pm: Greeting from the Master of Ceremonies

Keisha Bush, MFA

Keisha Bush is the Assistant Director of Communications for the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights. She has more than twenty years of experience in communications and marketing in both the private and nonprofit sector. She is an adjunct faculty member at New Jersey City University where she teaches English and literature courses, and she teaches writing courses at The Center For Fiction.

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1:05pm – 1:15pm: Welcoming remarks

Mary T. Bassett, MD, MPH

Mary T. Bassett, MD, MPH, is director of the François-Xavier Bagnoud (FXB) Center for Health and Human Rights and FXB Professor of the Practice of Health and Human Rights in the department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. With more than 30 years of experience devoted to promoting health equity and social justice, both in the United States and abroad, Dr. Bassett’s career has spanned academia, government, and not-for-profit work.

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Ralf Yusuf Gawlick, DMA

Ralf Yusuf Gawlick, of Romani-Kurdish descent, was born in Germany in 1969. His works include solo, chamber, orchestral, electro-acoustic, film and choral music, traversing a wide range of styles and often exploring aspects of his complex international heritage. His music has been commissioned and championed by a wide range of artists and organizations, attracting international acclaim from audiences and critics. Gawlick’s most recent composition, O Lungo Drom, an oratorio commissioned by the Alban Berg Ensemble Wien and dedicated to Romani Rose, Chairman of the Central Council of German Sinti and Roma, received its world première in October 2022 in the Konzerthaus Berlin for the 10th anniversary of the establishment of The Memorial to the Sinti and Roma Victims of National Socialism in Berlin. His music, published by several firms, has been performed internationally (in venues including Vienna’s Musikverein, New York’s Carnegie Hall) and is recorded on the Musica Omnia and Perfect Noise labels in composer-supervised performances by the works’ dedicatees. The world première recording of O Lungo Drom will be released in March 2024 on Decca Eloquence (Australia).

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Muhammad Hamid Zaman, PhD

Muhammad H. Zaman is HHMI professor of Biomedical Engineering and Global Health at Boston University. He received his master’s and P.h.D from the University of Chicago. In addition to five books and over 130 peer-reviewed research articles, Professor Zaman has written extensively on innovation, refugee and global health in newspapers around the world. His newspaper columns have appeared in over 30 countries and have been translated into eight languages. He has won numerous awards for his teaching and research, the most recent being Guggenheim Fellowship (2020) for his work on antibiotic resistance in refugee camps. His most recent book (We Wait for a Miracle: Healthcare and the Forcibly Displaced – Johns Hopkins Press 2023) provides a systematic analysis of the barriers to health care access among refugees, internally displaced persons, and stateless populations in often neglected areas of the world.

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1:15pm – 1:20pm: Framing the Conference Issues

Neringa Tumėnaitė, MSc

Neringa is a Ph.D. candidate at SOAS University of London and a visiting Fulbright Schuman fellow with the Roma Program at the FXB Center for Health & Human Rights, Harvard University. Her research delves into the role of youth participation in advancing climate justice. In addition, Neringa is the director of Humanity Consulting and a co-founder of the Erasmus+ Global Partnerships collective, which engages in dialogues youth civic society in Southeast Asia, Europe and North Africa. Previously, Neringa worked in Myanmar for the EU’s External Action Service and served on the Advisory Council on Youth of the Council of Europe, focusing on Roma youth participation and North-South cooperation. Neringa holds a BA in Creative Industries from Vilnius Tech and an MSc in Violence, Conflict, and Development from SOAS, where she investigated the role of the media in furthering structural discrimination against the Roma people in Lithuania and the Rohingya in Myanmar.

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1:20pm – 2:00pm: Keynote Panel – Lives Deemed Ungrievable

Margareta Matache, PhD (Panel Chair)

Dr. Margareta (Magda) Matache is a Lecturer on Social and Behavioral Sciences at the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and the co-founder and Director of the Roma Program at the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights, Harvard University. She is also a member of the O’Neill-Lancet Commission on Racism, Structural Discrimination and Global Health. Dr. Matache’s research focuses on the manifestations and impacts of racism and other systems of oppression in different geographical and political contexts.

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Cornel West, PhD

Dr. Cornel West, affectionately known to many as Brother West, is the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Chair at Union Theological Seminary. Dr. West is the former Professor of the Practice of Public Philosophy at Harvard University and Professor Emeritus at Princeton University. He graduated Magna Cum Laude from Harvard in three years and obtained his M.A. and Ph.D. in Philosophy at Princeton. Dr. West teaches on the works of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, as well as courses in Philosophy of Religion, African American Critical Thought, and a wide range of subjects – including but by no means limited to, the classics, philosophy, politics, cultural theory, literature, and music. He has a passion to communicate to a vast variety of publics in order to keep alive the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. – a legacy of telling the truth and bearing witness to love and justice. Dr. West has produced an extraordinary body of scholarship that has been transformative in the areas of American pragmatism, black theology and contemporary Marxist thought. He has written 20 books and has edited 13. He is best known for his classics, Race Matters and Democracy Matters, and for his memoir, Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud. His most recent book, Black Prophetic Fire, offers an unflinching look at nineteenth and twentieth-century African American leaders and their visionary legacies.

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2:00pm – 3:30pm: Panel 1 – Facets of State Violence across the Globe

Jacqueline Bhabha, JD, MSc (Panel Chair)

Jacqueline Bhabha is a Professor of the Practice of Health and Human Rights at the Harvard T.H.Chan School of Public Health, the Jeremiah Smith Jr. Lecturer in Law at Harvard Law School, and an Adjunct Lecturer in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. She is also the Director of Research at the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard University.

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Abadir M. Ibrahim, JSD (Panel Discussant)

Abadir M. Ibrahim is the Associate Director of the Human Rights Program (HRP) at Harvard Law School. He plays a substantive and managerial role in innovating and implementing academic activities, including the speaker series, conferences, and the HRP’s various fellowships. Dr. Ibrahim’s current research agenda focuses on African approaches to human rights and his broader research interests encompass the intersections between global human rights normative structures and non-Western cultural/religious institutions and traditions with an emphasis on normative ethics and religion. His academic and legal work focuses on African countries, and especially his home country of Ethiopia, and engages with the African system of human rights. Previously, he served as Head of the Secretariat for the Legal and Justice Affairs Advisory Council of Ethiopia, an independent statutory body tasked with advising and providing technical support to the Ethiopian government on pro-democracy and human rights-focused justice sector reforms.

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Cayetano Fernández

Cayetano Fernández is co-founder and militant of the anti-racist collective Kale Amenge, an autonomous Roma political initiative that over the last decade has focused its work on the self-organization of the Roma people as a political subject and on the critical production of political-theoretical tools aimed at the collective Roma emancipation and the rupture with the system of domination and political control imposed by whiteness. His research interest currently focuses on the epistemological (re)production of anti-Roma racism in the academic field of the so-called Romani Studies. Among his latest works, he has co-edited the book  State Racism. A collective overview from the perspective of autonomy and racial justice  (Txalaparta, 2023), and several articles published in different contexts and languages, such as “Anti-Roma racism and the white academic agenda,” “Tasks, disputes and challenges of Roma political anti-racism,” “The Roma Collective Memory and the Epistemological Limits of Western Historiography,” and “Anti-Roma racism, social work and the white civilizing mission.”

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Zeina Jallad, LM, JSD

Zeina Jallad, the first female J.S.D. graduate from the Arab region at Columbia Law School, completed her degree with the highest distinction. With over 15 years of legal practice and consulting experience, including work with international organizations such as IIIM, UN Women, OHCHR, UNDP, UNFPA, and the European Commission, she now serves as a residential fellow at Harvard University. Specializing in international law, her focus areas include human rights, climate, refugees, minorities, and gender. Zeina is a member of the Palestinian Bar Association (since 2004) and the New York City Bar (since 2012) and previously served as Secretary of the Committee on the Middle East and North Africa.

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Chelsi West Ohueri, PhD

Dr. Chelsi West Ohueri is a sociocultural anthropologist and Assistant Professor in the Department of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, with appointments in Anthropology, African and African Diaspora Studies, and Population Health. Her scholarship and teaching are primarily concerned with the study of race and racialization, belonging, marginalization, and medical anthropology. She has conducted extensive ethnographic research throughout Albania and the Balkan region and has recently completed a forthcoming book about the configurations of racial belonging and the productions of whiteness and blackness among Albanian, Romani, and Egyptian communities. Her scholarship has appeared in such journals as Slavic Review, Medical Anthropology, Qualitative Health Inquiry, and Gender, Place, and Culture.

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Suraj Milind Yengde, PhD

Dr. Suraj Yengde (सुरज एंगडे) is a W.E.B. Du Bois Fellow at Harvard University and one of India’s leading scholars and public intellectuals. Named as one of the “25 Most Influential Young Indian” by GQ magazine and the “Most influential Young Dalit” by Zee, Suraj is an author of the bestseller Caste Matters and co-editor of award winning anthology The Radical in Ambedkar. Suraj has published over 150 essays, articles, and book reviews in multiple languages in the field of caste, race, ethnicity studies, and labor, migration in the global south. Currently, he is involved in developing a critical theory of Dalit and Black Studies. His recent work with the philosopher Cornel West has received global attention and calls for unity between African Americans and Dalits. Suraj has worked with leading international organizations in Geneva, London, and New York. He is a co-convener of Dalit-Black Lives Matter symposium and the Dalit and Black Power Movement. He runs a monthly Ambedkar Lecture Series at Harvard. He is an associate editor of Southern Journal of Contemporary History.

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3:30pm – 3:45pm: Coffee Break

3:45pm – 5:30pm: Panel 2 – Facets of State Violence across the Globe – The Case of Health

Marie Plaisime, PhD, MPH (Panel Chair)

Dr. Marie Plaisime is an FXB Health and Human Rights Fellow and National Science Foundation (NSF) post-doctoral fellow. Her research investigates racial bias training in medical education and clinical practice, race-based medicine, algorithmic bias, and health policy. She applies critical quantitative, computational, & mixed methodologies to detect, examine, and quantify how structural racism in medicine jeopardizes healthcare delivery, access, and quality. She completed her PhD in Medical Sociology at Howard University and is a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) Health Policy Research Scholar (HPRS). Her professional experiences include research at the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Marie received her MPH from the Drexel University Dornsife School of Public Health.

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Mary T. Bassett, MD, MPH (Panel Discussant)

Mary T. Bassett, MD, MPH, is director of the François-Xavier Bagnoud (FXB) Center for Health and Human Rights and FXB Professor of the Practice of Health and Human Rights in the department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. With more than 30 years of experience devoted to promoting health equity and social justice, both in the United States and abroad, Dr. Bassett’s career has spanned academia, government, and not-for-profit work.

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Sawsan Abdulrahim, PhD, MPH

Sawsan Abdulrahim’s work centers human rights principles to illuminate and act upon social inequities in health across the life course, with a focus on refugee populations and labor migrants in the Arab region and beyond. She is the lead author of the Arab Watch Report 2023 on the Right to Health, a live document intended to inform policy and advocacy efforts toward achieving health for all in the Arab region.

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Sarah L. Bosha, LLM

Sarah L. Bosha is the director of the Capacity-Building Initiative and a visiting professor of law. Her work focuses on health, gender, and human rights and, in particular, advancing accountability and justice for violations of the right to health. Prior to joining O’Neill, Bosha worked as a Global Health Research Specialist at the Eck Institute for Global Health at the University of Notre Dame. In that role, she taught courses on health and human rights, and ethics in global health. She also supervised Masters of Global Health students in their capstone research projects focused on human rights issues in the Gambia. Bosha managed a partnership between the Eck Institute for Global Health and a leading international advocacy group, AIDS-Free World. In that capacity she worked with the Institute for Human Rights and Development in Africa, to support victims of Yahya Jammeh’s fraudulent HIV cure to obtain justice for violations of their right to health. In addition, she was part of the legal team that presented a petition before the Inter-American Commission on Human & Peoples Rights, challenging Jamaica’s homophobic Offences Against the Person Act, for its violation of the right to health and other human rights of LGBTQ+ persons.

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Cristina-Ioana Dragomir, PhD

Dr. Cristina-Ioana Dragomir is an immigrant and scholar of Social Justice and Human Rights, working on migration, gender and environment. Previously she taught at Queen Mary University of London, Columbia University, Institute for the Study of Human Rights; she served as an Assistant Professor of Political Science at SUNY Oswego, and was a Center for Advanced Study of India 2016-2018 Visiting Scholar at University of Pennsylvania. Additionally, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy. She also consults with the United Nations, GIZ, and IOM.

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Sebijan Fejzula

For the past 6 years Sebijan Fejzula has served as a junior researcher at the Centre for Social Studies in the project POLÍTICS- the politics of anti-racism in Europe and Latin America: knowledge production, decision-making and collective struggles  and is concurrently pursuing a Ph.D. in Human Rights in Contemporary Society at the University of Coimbra. She was of co-editor of State Racism: A Collective View from the Perspective of Autonomy and Racial Justice (2023) and boasts authorship of several articles, including: “Roma Liberation” (forthcoming); “Re-thinking Romani Genocide: Political-Analytical Considerations Regarding Roma Suffering in Current Democratic Societies” (2023); “De-Whitening of Romani Women’s Intersectional Experience” (2023); “Anti-Roma Racism, Social Work, and the White Civilisatory Mission” (2022); “The Anti-Roma Europe: Modern Ways of Disciplining the Roma Body in Urban Spaces” (2019); among others. Furthermore, Sebijan stands as a co-founding member of Kale Amenge (Roma for Ourselves), an independent anti-racist Roma organization dedicated to advancing the collective emancipation of the Roma people and the establishment of Roma political autonomy. 

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Simona Torotcoi, MSc, PhD

Simona Torotcoi is a Roma from Romania, currently a tutor at the Roma Graduate Preparation Program at CEU and research fellow at ReThink Central Eastern Europe of the German Marshall Fund of the United States. Simona has a Master’s degree in Public Policy from Central European University, and an MSc. in Public Administration from Leiden University, and graduated from the CEU Doctoral School of Political Science, Public Policy, and International Relations in 2020, with a specialization in Education Policy. Simona has collaborated with Roma civil society organizations such as the Roma Education Fund, ERGO Network or Phiren Amenca, where she conducted research related to Roma children and youth on different topics including the effectiveness of the affirmative action program for Roma, discrimination experiences, unemployment, political participation, Roma representation in textbooks representation. Simona has been a rights expert for the Global Forum of Communities Discriminated on Work and Descent (GFoD CDWD) representing the ERGO Network, where she supports global advocacy processes towards a UN Resolution on tackling work and descent-based discrimination. 

5:30pm – 5:40pm: Concluding Remarks

Natalia Linos, MSc, ScD

Dr. Natalia Linos is a social epidemiologist and the Executive Director of the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard. She has over 15 years of experience working at the global and local levels on some of the most pressing public health challenges of our time: from climate change to systemic racism. Since 2019, she has helped build a new research area for the FXB Center focused on racial justice. Along with Dr. Bassett, she co-leads the two largest programs in this area, namely to create an actionable field of scholarship on structural racism and health and make the public health case for reparations. These efforts build on their work together, including at the New York City Health Department and research on the social, legal and political determinants of health.

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5:40pm – 6:30pm: Book Talk

Maria Bogdan, PhD (Panel Chair)

Dr. Maria Bogdan is a media scholar and cultural theorist with extensive research interests in themes such as the media representation of Roma, racism, cultural memory, and cultural trauma. Currently, she serves as a Fortunoff Research Fellow at the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies. Dr. Bogdan earned her Ph.D. from the esteemed Film, Media, and Culture Theory Doctoral Program at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest in 2018. Notably, she held the prestigious position of the first Romani Rose postdoctoral research fellow at the Antigypsyism Research Center of Heidelberg University from 2019 to 2020. A Fulbright Alumna, Dr. Bogdan enriched her academic journey by conducting part of her Ph.D. research at Columbia University. As a founding member and managing editor of the Critical Romani Studies journal, she significantly contributes to scholarly discourse in her field. Additionally, she serves as the Chairwoman of the Barvalipe Academy of the European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture. Dr. Bogdan’s academic pursuits are complemented by her background in journalism and film, through which she offers occasional scholarly contributions to various respected online media platforms.

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Maria Y. Atanasova, MPS (Panel Discussant)

Maria Atanasova is a young researcher and a Roma activist from Bulgaria. For her activist work with Roma and non–Roma youth organizations, fighting for social inclusion and political representation in Bulgaria and across Europe, she has been awarded “Young European of the Year 2020.” Her substantial activist experience shaped her personal and academic interests. Maria is a trained midwife with a degree in the field of healthcare. Furthermore, she holds a master’s degree in political science, from the Central European University in Vienna where she acquired an Advanced Certificate in Romani Studies. Her master’s thesis investigates the electoral representation of Roma in Bulgaria: “Bulgarian political parties: an exploration of Roma representation in online electoral campaigns.” Her diverse background and academic interests have driven her to pursue further academic studies in the United States. Maria Atanasova is a Fulbright scholar pursuing a master’s in public policy at the University of Maryland, College Park.  Currently, she focuses on Roma policies in the European Union and security topics across the Balkans.

Ari Joskowicz, PhD

Ari Joskowicz is a historian of Europe with a special interest in the complicated relations between different minority groups. He is an Associate Professor of Jewish Studies and History and Chair of the Department of Jewish Studies at Vanderbilt University. His most recent book, Rain of Ash: Roma, Jews, and the Holocaust, is anew history of the genocide of Roma and Jews during World War II and their entangled quest for historical justice. It won the 2023 Frankel Prize in Holocaust Studies and was a Finalist for the National Jewish Book Prize. He is also the author of The Modernity of Others: Jewish Anti-Catholicism in Germany and France (Stanford Univ. Press 2014) and editor of Secularism in Question: Jews and Judaism in Modern Times (Univ. of Pennsylvania Press 2015). He also published several articles on Romani history including “Romani Refugees and the Postwar Order” (Journal of Contemporary History, 2016), “Separate Suffering, Shared Archives: Jewish and Romani Histories of Nazi Persecution” (History & Memory, 2016),  and “The Age of the Witness and the Age of Surveillance: Romani Holocaust Testimony and the Perils of Digital Scholarship” (American Historical Review, 2020). He has held fellowships from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Judaic Studies, and the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies, among others.

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Aidan McGarry, PhD

Aidan McGarry is Professor of International Politics at Loughborough University, London where he is the Associate Dean for Research and Innovation. He is the author of six books including Who Speaks for Roma? (Bloomsbury, 2010), Romaphobia: The Last Acceptable Form of Racism (Zed, 2017), The Aesthetics of Global Protest: Visual Culture and Communication (Amsterdam University Press, 2019, open access) and Political Voice: Protest, Democracy and Marginalized Groups (Oxford University Press, 2024). Previously, he led an AHRC–funded international project looking at protest aesthetics, communication and visual culture. Aidan has held a EURIAS Fellowship at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in Amsterdam (2018-19) where he was a Marie Curie Fellow. In 2022-23, he was recipient of a Fulbright Scholar Award based at University of Southern California Annenberg School of Communication where he conducted research on protest movements, social media and visual culture.  

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6:30pm: Reception

Please direct any questions about this event to Claire Street at cstreet@hsph.harvard.edu.

Free post-conference musical performance on Saturday, April 6, 2024. Open to the public.

Ralf Yusuf Gawlick's O Lungo Drom (The Long Road) ~ An Oratorio on the Sinti and Roma People ~

Details: Saturday, April 6, 2024 | 7:00pm EDT | Gasson Hall 100, 140 Commonwealth Ave, Chestnut Hill, MA 02467

• Clara Meloni, soprano; Christoph Filler, baritone; László Rácz, cimbalom
• Alban Berg Ensemble Wien
• 7:00pm: Pre-concert Lecture & Interview
• Lecture:”Past Silence: Understanding the Romani Holocaust Today,” Siv B. Lie, PhD, University of Maryland
• Interview between composer Ralf Yusuf Gawlick, DMA, Boston College, and Ioanida Costache, PhD, Stanford University
• 8:00pm: Concert

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Speakers’ remarks are based on their own scholarship and experience. As such, they speak for themselves, not for Harvard University.