Knowledge about Roma and Travellers in Nordic Schools: Paradoxes, Constraints, and Possibilities

Roma and Travellers are national minorities in Finland, Sweden, and Norway. To tackle the inequalities these national minorities face in schools, policies and practices that promote the provision of knowledge about Roma and Travellers for the school communities have been implemented. This chapter sets out to investigate the ways in which 18 interviewees—who identify themselves as Roma or Travellers and who work to promote the basic education of these groups—make sense of the measure. The analysis, which draws from feminist post-structural theories in education, suggests that with the knowledge they are providing the interviewees are reacting to forms of racialisation of Roma and Travellers in schools. In addition, the interviewees are challenging dominant narratives of the nations by discussing the relationship between Roma/Travellers and the nation-state. It is argued in the chapter, however, that the underlying assumption in the policy measure is that non-Roma and non-Travellers are not accountable for the racialisation of Roma and Travellers in schools and societies, or for changing the current racialising discourses. This chapter demonstrates that school communities and policymakers should actively analyse power relations within institutions and the narratives that are provided about the nations.