Out of Sight
Discover the winning 2026 project "Out of Sight: Anti-Racist Lessons Learned from the Dom Community at the Syrian–Jordanian Border" from the Louis Dumont Fund, which supports research in social anthropology.
The project
"This project examines the processes of racialization affecting the Mansour Dom, a Dom community living along the Syrian–Jordanian border, and the strategies they have developed to cope with anti-Gypsy violence. Drawing on fifteen months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Jordan between 2024 and 2025, the project explores how long-standing inherited representations continue to shape contemporary social relations and produce a continuum of racial violence. The research highlights the paradoxes of a national context that perceives itself as a victim of the global racial order while simultaneously reproducing racial hierarchies within its own society. By questioning the relevance of the concept of racialization in an Arab context, it argues that the violence experienced by the Dom cannot be understood solely in terms of social marginalization, but rather as part of a continuum of racial violence. Finally, it identifies the main strategies mobilized by the Dom to confront these forms of violence: concealment, anticipation, the reproduction of racial hierarchies, and migration."
Kahina Guillard
Kahina Guillard (INALCO, CERMOM/CESSMA) is a PhD candidate in political anthropology under the supervision of Bruno Hérin and Mériam Cheikh. The provisional title of her dissertation is *Anti-Racist Lessons Learned from the Dom Community at the Syrian–Jordanian Border*. Her ethnographic research examines the strategies employed by Dom families to navigate situations of violence, particularly in the context of anti-Gypsy racism.
