ABSTRACT
This chapter identifies the nature and content of the debates within Gypsy/Romani Studies as revealed by a source which is not publically available and so which cannot be independently verified. The tensions and difficulties in Gypsy/Romani studies reveal the highly sensitised and politicised dimension of research activity and writing which focuses on a group which continues to experience some of the longest lasting and most virulent forms of discrimination and antipathy. Identity, identity politics and ethnicity are a constant explicit or implicit element of almost every exchange between members, with notions of ethnicity tested and expounded at length. One observable development has been a slow but progressive shift away from the idea that ethnicity is bounded, fixed and mutually exclusive towards a perspective which sees ethnicity as fluid, changing and flexible. The chapter reviews that the terrain has not shifted and the themes of identity, origins, ethnicity, discrimination and numbers remain the same.
