From the Past to the Present: Awareness of the Construction of Prejudice Among Young Roma and Adolescents Through an Action research

From an international project (TRACER) funded by the European Commission’s Citizenship, Equality, Rights and Values Programme, this paper presents reflec-tions from an action-research study involving groups of Roma and non-Roma youth in Italy, Portugal and Poland, in the construction of a shared memory of the Holocaust of Roma minorities in Europe. Reconstructing this moment in his-tory means recovering a part of the unknown events of the persecution of these populations in Europe. For young Roma and Sinti, being aware of the cultural process that led to the creation of the extermination camps and how the con-cept of diversity defined on the basis of ‘race’ spread throughout Europe, al-lows them to deconstruct the stereotypes of the present and contributes to rebuild a culture of respect and rights.