Focaal special issue on “The politics of emptiness”

Authors: Dace Dzenovska, Volodymyr Artiukh, Dominic Martin, Anna Varfolomeeva, Anna Balazs, Anastasiya Ryabchuk, Dragan Đunda, Ivan Rajković, Nejra Nuna Čengić, Natalia Ryzhova, Alessandro Rippa, Madeleine Reeves, Franck Billé, Caroline Humphrey

Location: Bosnia, China, Russia, Serbia, Ukraine

Themes: Borders, Deindustrialization, Depopulation, Extractivism, Infrastructure, Nothingness, Politics, Postsocialism, Tourism, War

This special issue of Focaal (vol. 2023, issue 96) – guest edited by the EMPTINESS team – focuses on the politics of emptiness. The people who think of emptying as a loss and those who think of emptying as an opportunity are not the same political subjects. The shift from thinking about emptiness as a loss to thinking about emptiness as an opportunity is a political shift, a moment of decision about the place of the present in a framework of meaning that gives form and direction to life. There is no neutral platform, no shared frame, in which all – those who see emptiness as a loss and those who see it as an opportunity – can be equally represented or can equally take part.

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The intimate and everyday geopolitics of the Russian war against Ukraine

Authors: Maria Gunko, Sven Daniel Wolfe, Olena Denysenko, Dina Krichker, OLga Rebro

Location: Armenia, Norway, Spain, Ukraine

Themes: Affect, Bordering, Geopolitics, Mobility, Violence, War

This Forum publication analyses the Russo-Ukraine war from the micro-perspective of everyday life by scholars who have been personally impacted by the war. Maria Gunko’s contribution focuses on a town in rural Armenia where an abandoned Soviet-era factory is being inhabited and restored by a small alternative community of people fleeing the violence of the war in Ukraine and the oppression of governments in Russia and Belarus. Contextualised within Armenia’s own turbulent post-Soviet history, Gunko examines the micro-politics of this multinational attempt to build a kind of improvised refuge out of the shell of the Soviet built environment.

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Collaborate with us

If you would like to find out more about the project or contribute a blog on a resonant aspect of your own research to the Field Reports section of our website, please get in touch by writing to emptiness@anthro.ox.ac.uk.