Emptiness

92-year old Milda lives in a village next to a former railway station in the Latvian-Russian borderlands. During the Soviet period, it was a vibrant transportation hub. Residents recall 'wagons of watermelons' that passed through and 'crowds of summer residents' that came from Leningrad. Things have changed since then. This European Research Council-funded project aims to find out what these changes mean for the people who are living them, and what they reveal about forms of capitalism and political authority in postsocialist spaces and beyond.

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Destruction of signs, signs of destruction

Authors: Volodymyr Artiukh

Types: Observations

Location: Russia, Ukraine

Themes: Representations, War

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Emptiness project collaboration with MLU Halle-Wittenberg

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Making sense of the war in Ukraine

Authors: Volodymyr Artiukh, Emma Rimpiläinen, Dace Dzenovska, Madeleine Reeves, Anna Balazs, Roosa Rytkönen

This forum is one attempt to make sense of the war and related events in a constantly shifting landscape. Most of us contributing to this forum are anthropologists. Some of us work explicitly on questions of migration, mobility and displacement. Others have been trying to make sense of how, in shifting political contexts, our informants seek to navigate competing epistemic claims about freedom and truth. Each of us finds ourselves trying to track an avalanche-in-motion, figuring out what the war means for our interlocutors and their families, for their livelihoods and futures, for their practices of social navigation when homes and/or hopes have been upturned.

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