Anna Žabicka Visiting Academic

1 September to 30 December 2023

Anna is a PhD candidate in social anthropology at the University of Vienna. Anna holds a master’s degree in social anthropology from Wayne State University (Detroit, MI, 2019) and Rīga Stradiņš University (Riga, Latvia, 2014).

In her dissertation, Anna studies ageing and care in the Latvian countryside. She analyzes how the discourse of ageing as an emptiness and national endangerment affects the ageing experiences of older adults and the ways of life of employees who work at the rural nursing home. Through her ethnographic data, Anna shows that (rural) emptiness is a generational problem and that the nursing home, which politically is seen as a core of the nation’s emptiness, not only locally becomes a focal point of publicly and politically unrecognized continuity and liveliness but also through late-life care shapes the imagined nation and the contemporary state.