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Overview
The project studies the emptying cities, towns, and villages in Eastern Europe and Russia through the lens of “emptiness” as a concrete historical formation that has emerged in conditions when socialist modernity is gone, and promises of capitalist modernity have failed. More specifically, it (1) studies the experiences and narratives of emptiness and emptying; (2) examines the politics and governance of emptying and emptiness; and (3) uses post-socialist “emptying” and “emptiness” as lenses for analysing global reconfigurations of relations between capital, the state, people, and place at a time when capital flows and statecraft are increasingly concentrated in “global cities,” with the rest of urban and non-urban spaces becoming radically disconnected.
Visit the website: emptiness.eu
ERC studentship
Applications are invited for a DPhil studentship in anthropology or migration studies; read more here.
Principal Investigator
Researchers
Volodymyr Artiukh, Research Associate
Dominic Martin, Postdoctoral Researcher
Friederike Pank, DPhil candidate in Social Anthropology
Maria Gunko, DPhil candidate in Migration Studies
Michelle Chew, Project Manager
Funding
European Research Council
The project will collaborate with local universities in Latvia, Russia, Belarus and Ukraine. In Latvia, the Riga Stradiņš University will host the Principal Investigator for the duration of fieldwork.
Countries
Latvia, Russia, Ukraine, Belarus
Dzenovska, D. (2019). Emptiness: Capitalism After Socialism, Medium
Dzenovska, D. (2020). Emptiness: Capitalism Without People in the Latvian Countryside, American Ethnologist
Dzenovska, D. (2019). The Timespace of Emptiness, American Ethnologist
Podcast
“Emptiness: Ways of Seeing” | 28 Sep-1 Oct 2021
- Roundtable 1: Emptiness: Space, Capital and the State
- Roundtable 2: On the Edge: Life along the Russia-China border. A book discussion with Franck Billé and Caroline Humphrey
These roundtables were recorded at the conference, part of the ERC-funded EMPTINESS project at the University of Oxford. Rīga Stradiņš University generously hosted the 28 Sep 2021 Field Workshop and a local in-person viewing hub.
Постсоветская пустота (Post-Soviet Emptiness), Polka “Tozhe Rossia” (in Russian) | October 2019