This book brings to the fore the voices and activism of marginalised and often condemned communities about whom there is little informed public debate. The editors of this volume take a critical approach to the received wisdom, looking for transformative change, emancipation and self-determination to pursue well-being, social justice and human rights. We are partisan in support of oppressed peoples’ self-organisation (cf Fuchs, 2006), and analytical in taking their plight as indicative of the structural fault-lines in the ideologies of the powerful.

This book examines how Gypsy, Roma and Traveller (GRT) communities have produced new, counter-hegemonic responses to marginalisation over the past half-century through mobilisation and campaigning, by traditional leadership, new forms of non-governmental organisation (NGO) activity and community development. Resistance can range from defying pressures to conform by determinedly maintaining traditional lifestyles, to challenging assimilation through innovation and adaptation. This is a moving story of endurance and tenacity, in which some of the most marginalised people in society, including some who do not have literacy skills, have found the resources and strength to offer resistance leading to, or offering a potential for, transformative change.

Location at the margins of society can provide ‘spaces of radical openness’, removed from the gaze of dominant society (hooks, 1991). Excluded communities occupying marginal space may more readily form an ideology of resistance which is also a mirror to the wider society. Hence, there is much to be learnt about the values and nature of wider society through the eyes of those like GRT communities that are ostracised and excluded.

Answering the ‘call to context’ issued by one of the founders of Critical Race Theory (Delgado, 1995, p xviii), we present personal stories of adopting new life and political strategies through the authorship of or by edited interviews with GRT community members. These ‘thick descriptions’ ensure that the subjects of the book and their aspirations are not lost in a fog of abstraction (Geertz, 1973, pp 3–30). Indeed as activist-scholars we contend that knowledge produced on a community's mobilisation should be accessible to those on whom the work is focused and not be hidden away in distant and inaccessible academic publications (Gillan and Pickerill, 2012).