The Finnish Roma community has a 500-year history behind it. From the beginning, it has faced periods of collective doubt and criticism of its differences from the mainstream. Henry Hedman grew up in Riihimäki, where his father had worked hard for the acceptance of his Roma background. The family led a perfectly ordinary life in the midst of the majority population.

Henry Hedman works as a University Instructor of Romani and Roma culture in the Faculty of Arts at Helsinki University. The programme was launched in 2012. Before that, Hedman worked at the Centre for the Languages of Finland for ten years and the six years before that he was managing director of Romano Missio.

The Roma are the largest ethnic minority in Europe with approximately 10–12 million people. Outside of Europe, there are sizeable Roma communities in North and South America. In Finland, they number around 13,000. Only one out of three speaks the Finnish Romani language fluently, which makes the language endangered. The Finnish constitution, however, guarantees the rights of the Sami, the Roma and other groups to maintain and develop their own language and culture.

Without a doubt, my best memory at the University of Helsinki is when around a dozen Roma students participated in my courses in the autumn of 2014. It was the first time that so many Roma and majority students sat together in the same classroom.

My dream is to finish my doctoral dissertation before I reach the retirement age. In my research, I particularly want to find out how Roma culture fares in relationships in which only one party is a Roma. I hope that my research counters the received wisdom that such relationships supposedly destroy the culture.