Romani people are the largest minority in Europe; however, Roma women are largely missing or misrepresented in digital public knowledge spaces. When Romnja (‘Roma women’ in Romanes) histories, feminist perspectives and community knowledge appear online, they are often owned or mediated by non-Roma actors and frequently fail to reflect Roma women’s lived experience, instead reproducing stereotypes and prejudices. This creates a form of digital inequality that is structural rather than individual: knowledge exists, but it is not visible, valued, or governed by the community itself.
This project responds to that gap by testing whether Romnja feminist knowledge can become visible in digital public spaces through a community-led and ethical process. The project will explore how Romnja women can collectively decide what knowledge should be made visible online, how it should be represented, and under what conditions. The project builds on the Romnja Feminist Library as an existing community-governed knowledge space, using it as a testing ground to intervene in wider digital knowledge systems rather than creating a parallel platform. The intervention challenges who produces content, how visibility is negotiated, and whose expertise counts.
The project will actively engage participants from Romania and Spain, bringing together a cross-country group of 10 Romnja women. Participants will collaboratively co-design and contribute content to the pilot, shaping what knowledge becomes visible online and ensuring ethical and community-led decision-making.
The project fits the INCLUDE+ call by addressing digital equity as a question of power, representation and civic participation, and by focusing on systemic change through concrete digital civic action. The work is interdisciplinary and community-based, bringing together feminist knowledge production, digital practice and civic intervention. Digital outputs are treated not as neutral information, but as actions that can shift narratives and enable Romnja women to participate more fully in digital civic life.
The project aligns with INCLUDE+ principles by valuing lived experience as expertise, using co-production as a core method, and testing ethical alternatives to extractive digital practices. As a feasibility study, it will generate practical learning about risks, limits and possibilities, and produce methods that can inform future work across the INCLUDE+ network.
Team
Aldessa Georgiana Lincan – Co‑Founder & Project Lead, Romnja Feminist Library (RFL)
Community Contributors Network – Romnja Feminist Library community authors and collaborators