Biography
Trained as a social and cultural anthropologist at the University of California in Berkeley, I work mostly with themes in political anthropology: space, place, and power, sovereignty, empire, capitalism, migration, liberalism and nationalism, and the intersection of postsocialist and postcolonial/decolonial perspectives. I have conducted long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Latvia and the United Kingdom.
Research interests
My first book School of Europeanness: Tolerance and Other Lessons in Political Liberalism (2018, Cornell University Press) examines efforts to instil liberal political virtues in the Latvian society and political institutions as part of postsocialist liberalization and democratization initiatives. The book argues that Eastern Europe should be viewed as a laboratory for the forging of post-Cold War political liberalism in Europe.
Currently, I am leading a research project on emptying places in Latvia, Armenia, Russia, and Ukraine. The project aims to understand what it means to live in and govern places that are losing their constitutive elements, as well as what such places can tell us how changing forms of capitalism and political authority produce space as an emptying place. I am also making a documentary film that extends my research on emptiness beyond the postsocialist world and focuses on locations in the UK, Italy, and Germany in addition to Romania and Latvia.
Alongside the research project on emptiness, I am writing a book entitled Empires We Choose: Sovereignty and Migration in Europe’s Peripheries. The book is based on ten years of research on the mobility of people and capital to and from Latvia and the United Kingdom.
Project website: Emptiness: emptying towns and villages in Eastern Europe
Further publications
https://www.anthro.ox.ac.uk/people/dr-dace-dzenovska#tab-267551
Podcasts
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- Emigration from Central and Eastern Europe: Origin Country Perspectives
- Diagnosing intolerance: knowledge practices in postsocialist Europe
- Постсоветская пустота (Post-Soviet Emptiness), Polka “Tozhe Rossia” podcasts with Dmitri Oparin and Maria Semendyaeva, Moscow, October 2019
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ODID COVID Flash Talks
Jordan Center, New York University
Strelka X Summer
(Russian and English)
TEDxRiga
