Jan Ort presented a paper at the IMISCOE Annual Conference (2–5 July 2024, Lisbon & online) in an online panel on Visibilizing Roma People in the Debate on Race and Racialization in Europe: Empirical Evidence and Policy Challenges.
Jan’s paper “(In)visibilization of anti-Roma Racism in the Context of the War in Ukraine” brought together the situation of both Ukrainian Roma, who found themselves in the position of refugees in Czechia, and Czech Roma, for whom the war-related situation brought new circumstances for negotiating their own position in the Czech society.
His presentation contributed to the discussion of the relational understanding of racial formations, shifting it to the perspective of the Roma themselves. He observed how Roma, in different social contexts, thought of various modes of racism and racialization. Jan argued that for Roma, racism functioned as a way of naming the process of discrimination and marginalization of a given group of people as well as a way of explaining internal differences and defining relations among Roma themselves.
He suggested that it is necessary to take a relational approach to observe the diverse positions of Roma in non-Romani societies. In other words, comparing the situation of Roma in different countries as isolated groups falls to some extent into the trap of methodological nationalism. It neglects not only the interconnectedness of Romani experiences that transcend national borders but also how the Roma themselves perceive these different experiences and integrate them into their own definition of inter-Roma relations.