Call for Papers Call for papers – The Othered Child: Roma (and) Childhood between History and Antigypsyist Fantasy

Interdisciplinary Workshop
October 29th-30th, 2026 | online

The workshop is convened by Dr. Radmila Mladenova (Critical Film & Image Hub, Research Centre on Antigypsyism, Heidelberg University), Dr. Joey Rauschenberger (Department of History, Heidelberg University), and Dr. Ismael Cortès (UNESCO Chair of Philosophy for Peace, Jaume I University).

Submission Deadline: June 30th, 2026

Workshop Description

This interdisciplinary workshop brings together scholars from various fields including history, film and literary studies, education, and cultural studies to explore a topic that has received strikingly little critical attention: the representation of Roma childhood and children within cultural imaginaries, set in direct juxtaposition to the historical realities that shaped their lived experiences.

The workshop sets out to explore two sharply contrasting yet deeply intertwined dimensions:

• The phantasmic, often stereotypical or exoticizing portrayals of Roma in children’s literature and film, where antigypsyist ideology, cultural projection, and fantasy routinely overshadow lived experience.
• The historical facts of Roma childhood, including archival evidence, testimonies, and scholarly research that document the material conditions, social realities, and political contexts shaping the lives of Roma children in their communities or interacting with the majority society across different periods.

While individual papers may concentrate on one of the two dimensions – either historical realities of children or the representational phantasms of Roma childhood – the workshop program will be structured so as to produce a bifocal perspective, enabling these approaches to illuminate one another through cross-panel exchange and collective discussion.

We warmly invite established scholars, doctoral candidates, and early-career researchers from across Europe whose work engages with literature, film, history, childhood studies, critical Romani studies, antigypsyism studies, memory studies, educational studies or related fields. Contributions that adopt comparative, transnational, or theoretically innovative approaches are especially welcome.

The workshop will feature short, focused presentations (10 to 15 minutes), and panel participants will be invited to read one another’s papers in advance, allowing us to dedicate the live sessions to in-depth, substantive discussion rather than introductory summaries.

The organizers plan to develop the workshop contributions into a peer-reviewed edited volume or a journal special issue, offering the first interdisciplinary publication dedicated to the historical and imaginative constructions of Roma childhood.

Submission Guidelines

Those interested in presenting their paper in a 10 to 15-minute talk are invited to submit an abstract (up to 500 words) and a short biography (up to 150 words) in English by June 30th, 2026 in a single PDF file to joey.rauschenberger@zegk.uni-heidelberg.de and icortes@uji.es.

Successful applicants will be notified by July 31st, 2026.

About the Organizers: 

This online interdisciplinary Workshop is hosted by the Critical Film & Image Hub at the Research Centre on Antigypsyism (RCA) at Heidelberg University, and organized in partnership with the Department of History at Heidelberg University and the UNESCO Chair of Philosophy for Peace at Jaume I University. The Film Hub’s research, funded through the “Cooperation Network Against Antigypsyism” under the federal program “Living Democracy!” of the German Ministry for Education, Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women, and Youth (BMEFSFJ), investigates the mechanisms of visual antigypsyism.