About us
Our pillars
Research, Memory and Justice are not three separate areas: one produces the knowledge, another keeps it from being lost, and the third asks what we do with it.
Research
Researching from our own questions.
For too long, the questions about the Roma people were formulated by others. We promote and take part in research on our history, our cultures, our resistance and the violence that runs through us.
We work from Romani, anti-racist, feminist, intersectional and decolonial perspectives, combining academic rigour with situated knowledge.
We do not only want a place within research on the Roma people: we want to transform the way that knowledge is produced.
Memory
What is not preserved can also disappear.
Our history does not live only in official archives. It lives in words, songs, objects, languages and testimonies passed from one generation to the next, and an enormous part of that memory was left out by the institutions deciding what to preserve.
We recover, document and pass on. Not to build a single history of the Roma people, but to preserve many: from different territories and generations, of those who resisted, created, migrated or stayed.
Because a people also needs to be able to find itself in its own past.
Justice
Knowing is also a way of doing justice.
Knowing what happened lets us name it; documenting it, prove it; preserving it, keep it from disappearing; passing it on, let other generations understand it.
We work for historical, social, political and academic justice through research, education, memory, advocacy and the defence of human rights. Against anti-Roma racism, producing knowledge means contesting the ideas that sustain it.
Research produces knowledge. Memory keeps it from being lost. Justice asks what we do with it.
Our knowledge also has many voices
There is no single Romani experience: we are a people crossed by different countries, languages, generations, genders and migrations. So we are not looking for a voice to replace the others, but for spaces where many Romani voices produce and share knowledge.
Our feminist perspective is part of that commitment. Romani women have preserved, passed on and created knowledge for generations, even when their voices were left out of the places where that knowledge was recognised.
We understand Romani women and gender-diverse people not only as political subjects, but also as epistemic subjects.
From knowledge to the school, the archive and society
Knowledge needs different paths in order to circulate, and our work takes different forms.
And we created CHANIPEN Press, our own imprint, because producing knowledge from within our communities also requires our own infrastructure to publish it.
From Cartagena. Without borders.
CHANIPEN was born in Cartagena in 2025. This is where our office is and where much of our educational and community work takes place.
But the Roma people do not fit inside a border, and neither should the knowledge we produce. That is why we build alliances with people, organisations and universities in different countries.
From the local to the international. From our communities to academia. And from research back to our communities.
For too long, knowledge was produced about us without us. CHANIPEN exists to help change that.
Our knowledge · Our memory · Our voices