The Academy of St Francis of Assisi is a coeducational joint-faith Roman Catholic and Church of England academy in Kensington, Liverpool. This month, students and staff at the Academy came together in memory of the millions of people murdered during the Holocaust, and their approach was to combine past and present and look at how ethnic groups still face prejudice and discrimination today. 

We are happy to announce that our colleague Laurence Prempain will participate at the seminar “Minority Experiences and European Narratives: Contemporary and Historical Perspectives”, that is going to take place on 14-16 April 2021 in Turku (Finland), with a contribution entitled “They are ‘part of our world and yet distinct from the rest of us’. The Roma people: forgotten Resistance fighters of the Second World War”.

This seminar is co-organized by the minority research profile at Åbo Akademi University and the Centre of Excellence in Law, Identity and the European Narratives (EuroStorie) at the University of Helsinki. Its aim is to explore the multifaceted links between minority experiences and European narratives, both in the past and in the present. By shifting the focus from official to minoritarian narratives of Europem the seminar hopes to contribute to a more complex picture of Europe and Europeanness.

Find information in: https://www.abo.fi/en/annual-minority-seminar-2021/

In Spain, 22 October 2020 not only saw the rejection in parliament of the motion of censure brought by the extreme right-wing party, VOX, against the prime minister, Pedro Sánchez. That day also saw an event full of meaning: the standing ovation given to the Gitana MP, Beatriz Carrillo de los Reyes, led by her colleague and the government’s parliamentary spokeswoman, Adriana Lastra, who made a point of mentioning Beatriz Carrillo in her speech from the podium when responding to the motion, and dedicating an “Arise, Romani Women” to her in the Romani language. The rallying cry "Opre Roma" is a slogan common to Romani organisations throughout the world. It invokes the capacity for struggle and resistance of a historically persecuted European people, who have been subjected to a form of racial prejudice that has been particularly successful in achieving its desired result; the Nazi holocaust was the extrem, but not the only, nor the last manifestation of this racism.

A new result of our BESTROM research project has just been published. It is the book by our colleague María Sierra, entitled Holocausto gitano. El genocidio romaní bajo el nazismo.* This is a book written in Spanish about the Roma genocide, driven by the great lack of publications on the subject in the Spanish-speaking world and designed to make researchers and the general public reflect on this gap.