‘What was Emptiness, and What Comes Next?’ conference

University of Oxford

4-6 June 2025

The EMPTINESS project’s concluding conference, ‘What was Emptiness, and What Comes Next?’ will take place in-person at the University of Oxford on 4-6 June 2025. An exciting array of scholars will join us in panels and roundtables convened by the project researchers, as we reflect on the project’s intellectual and methodological trajectory – and consider: what comes after ’emptiness’?

Conference attendance is free, but the number of places is limited. Registration to attend the conference will open in May 2025.

Below are the panel / roundtable descriptions. The programme with a timetable will be available at a later date. The conference poster is downloadable here.

We look forward to sharing in this event with you!

Forms of Collaboration | roundtable Collaboration and comparison have long been part of anthropological practice but have become subject to intense reflection in the last few years. Some anthropologists have reflected on collaboration with interlocutors, others on collaboration between anthropologists, some on comparison undertaken by lone anthropologists, but few explicitly on collaborative comparison. This panel brings together anthropologists who are working or have worked on comparative and collaborative ethnographic projects, to reflect on the insights that this kind of anthropological work has produced, as well as on the conditions that enable or demand collaborative work, such as funding landscapes, increasingly complex problem questions, and a sense of political urgency. • Beyond the solitary figures of anthropology and anthropologists: How collaboration could relocate anthropological relations | Sarah Green, University of Helsinki • Second-order anxieties: On comparison and scale | Rebecca Bryant, Utrecht University • Collaborative intelligence: How to make anthropologists and AI agents work together as a team | Morten Pedersen, University of Copenhagen • On the embrace of zigzag learning | Don Kalb, University of Bergen • Collaborative ethnographic comparison | Dace Dzenovska, University of Oxford Convenor: Dace Dzenovska

Keyplaces of Our Times | double panel We seem to be living through a chronotopic shift. More and more scholars and publics, whether in the Global North, South, or East, think—or are invited to think—at a planetary scale and in geological time. This does not mean that other chronotopes, such as the global-historical, have disappeared or are devalued. Moreover, temporal logics and spatial organization are changing within chronotopes. For example, the future no longer promises to deliver us from the ills of the present. Instead, sorting out relations with the past is thought to propel us into the future. Previous spatial categories, such as the city and the country, the centre and the periphery, no longer seem sufficient for capturing contemporary spatial configurations, relations, and hierarchies. As a result, scholars offer new conceptualizations of time, space, power, and politics. Most people, however, live in places and use vernacular categories, such as emptiness in the case of our research, to make sense of the radical reconfigurations of their worlds. This panel invites participants to think about keyplaces—and key subjects—of our times. What are they and what do they reveal about spatial and temporal configurations of power? Do they push against the limits of dominant theories of space, time, and power? Do they provide vernacular analytics that open new possibilities for understanding and acting? • Place, territory, terrain: A spatial triad for a world on fire | Gáston Gordillo, University of British Columbia • Upstream, downstream, offshore | Julie Chu, University of Chicago • Rural Spain: Emptiness, energy transitions, and politics | Jaume Franquesa, State University of New York, Buffalo • Quarantine road | Chloe Ahmann, Cornell University • Unprecedented : Emptiness | Daniel Knight, University of St. Andrews • What makes emptying places keyplaces of our times? | Dace Dzenovska, University of Oxford Discussants: Rebecca Bryant, Utrecht University | Madeleine Reeves, University of Oxford Convenor: Dace Dzenovssa

War, Destruction, and Capital Accumulation | roundtable Emplaced accumulation of capital produces exhausted, ‘worthless’, and stagnating spaces, which Don Kalb calls ‘value’s flip side’. When hegemony breaks down, state-organised and privatised violence creates outright devastation where value is destroyed in a negative sum game. Anthropologists study abandoned places attributed to structural violence, but accessing massive areas devastated by wars and enclosed by security forces is harder. This panel engages with the anthropological history of the late 20th and early 21st centuries as the history of mass geographic, demographic, and environmental destruction related to the secular crisis in accumulation and energy resource extraction. Christophe Bonneuil and Jeane-Baptiste Fressoz argue that our age is the Thanatocene, where Western warfare is integrated into the industrial system and science. Social Science is increasingly filled with ‘-cides’: urbicides, ecocides, and climacides, while the liberal way of solving crises leads to further crises, shifting costs to the peripheries. With the waning of the American ‘incoherent empire’ and heightened inter-imperialist struggle, slow and ‘fast’ violence seems to spiral out of control. • Bad, mad and dangerous: The voracious value regimes of post-liberal security | Ruben Andersson, University of Oxford • Keynesian militarism, or doubledown necropolitics?: Perspectives on authoritarian capitalism at the ‘home front’ in Russia in the fourth (?) year of war | Jeremy Morris, Aarhus University • Devaluation of military labour on Ukraine’s emptying frontlines | Taras Fedirko, University of Glasgow • Liberal accumulation and the return of the king | Don Kalb, University of Bergen • TBA | Zsuzsa Gille, University of Illinois • Martial placemaking: Spatial practices and representations along the Russo-Ukrainian frontline | Volodymyr Artiukh, University of Oxford Convenor: Volodymyr Artiukh

Land, Space, and Place in the Russian Far East | panel This panel examines the play of change across the vast and various lands of the Russian Far East (RFE). Participants will seek ways to define and think with this macro geographical region as an anthropological locality through a focus on the land. Land-centric treatment of the contemporary RFE space-place will consider the new forms of digital and algorithmic power that are reshaping the region and ‘producing space’, whether populated or empty. How is such a system used by, for, and against local Far Easterners? What disputes arise over the measuring and apportioning of land in agriculture, the zoning of land for industrial development, or the projection of spaces into shrinking and statistical oblivion? Another important dimension is how this spatialising power interacts with the RFE’s evolving migration regime. Former closed spaces were turned in the 2010s into special economic zones and will soon become in the 2020s ‘international territories of advanced development’ where normal citizenship laws will not apply. What do these evolving spatial politics entail, literally, on the ground? How do Far Eastern lands get revalued by sovereign decree as the Russian state’s spatial priorities shift? What happens when current Russian geopolitical aspirations meet the obdurate Far Eastern lands with their palimpsest of imperial legacy? If classic anthropological studies show that land is the site par excellence at which the individual and the collective are imbricated, then what assumptions about personhood are entailed by and become confounded when such state projects touch the ground, in the lands where diverse Far Easterners (Russians, Koreans, Cossacks, Chinese, etc.) meet? • The Russian Far East: Speculating on land and on a future that never comes | Natalia Ryzhova, Palacký University • Spirit of capitalism or impulse to growth: Multiplicity of land in agricultural work in Primorskii Krai, Russia | Hyun-Gwi Park, Kyung Hee University • The informal economy of survival in the midst of official emptiness: Peripheral capitalism on the Upper Lena | Ivan Peshkov, Adam Mickiewicz University • TBA | Dominic Martin, University of Oxford Discussant: Alexander Vorbrugg, University of Bern Convenor: Dominic Martin

Desire for Power | double panel The chaotic process of postsocialist privatization led to significant gaps in public accountability and resources management, creating a landscape where legal and moral obligations of state and non-state actors in relation to property still remain unclear. In many places, management of and care for different types of property—personal, private, and public—is shaped by a climate of normalized austerity, that is, the acceptance of the ideology of shortage in relation to human, material, and financial resources. This climate of normalized austerity manifests in discourses and practices of self-reliance, in attempts to assert or shed the rights of private owners, and in paternalistic approaches to the management of public property. This panel seeks to explore how, within messy and ambiguous property regimes, new forms of power emerge and intersect with structures created by the old ones. It focuses on the aspirations and expectations of people with regard to (re)production of place and social life. By discussing the figures that are evoked in conversations about (dis)order and (lack of) care (e.g. the state, an owner [khozyin, ter, etc.], an anonymous ‘they’), the panel aims to identify what actors and forces are held or invited to be responsible for keeping things going and/or for destroying things. • Common weal and chastnik: The death and rebirth of public buses in Kryvyi Rih, Ukraine | Denys Gorbach, Sciences Po • Who will repair our building? | Tamta Khalvashi, Ilia State University • The landscape of solitude: Power, loss, and place in post-industrial Armenia | Harutyun Vermishyan, Yerevan State University • Failed transition? From post-Soviet commons to independent urban spaces in Armenia | Sarhat Petrosyan, Yerevan State University/urbanlab • Khoziain and the desire for a more human(e) state in a former socialist town in Lithuania | Marija Norkunaite, Vilnius University • Emotional geographies of loss and neglect – and how they feed the success of right-wing parties | Katrin Grossmann, University of Applied Sciences Erfurt • “They destroyed it”: Responsibility and ruination in a small Armenian town | Maria Gunko, University of Oxford Discussants: Caroline Humphrey, University of Cambridge | Dace Dzenovska, University of Oxford Convenor: Maria Gunko