Creolizing subjectivities and relationalities within Roma-gadje research collaborations

This chapter is the result of a collaboration between Gabriela and Ioana, a Romni (Roma woman in Romanes) and a gadji (non-Roma woman), a participant/street-vendor/cleaner and a researcher/work supervisor, two women born in 1980s Romania and currently living in Finland, two friends. We apply a dialogical and co-authorial approach to challenge the structural divides and power hierarchies between us and our worlds. We thus tell each other stories as a means of travelling to each other's worlds and weaving knowledges otherwise. But even if we try to cross divides and hierarchies, they continue to shape and influence our interactions and conversations and cannot be done away with through our collaboration. Is Ioana therefore tokenizing Gabriela as her co-author? To address this issue, we creolize our subjectivities and relationalities, thus working through, against, and beyond those divides. We work through them by revealing the process of producing hierarchical order when we cannot help not reproducing it due to our unequal power positions. We work against and beyond them through an ongoing, open-ended process of becoming based on mutual self-reflection and self-aware experimentation, through which we contest and re/negotiate the boundaries and hierarchies between each other and our worlds. We thus understand the interconnected and inter-relational character of our beings without erasing the power differences between us. We make conscious choices of doing research otherwise and share our failures as steps toward imagining new possible worlds of Roma-gadje creolized conviviality.