Authors: Maria Gunko
Location: Armenia
Themes: Demodernization, Infrastructure
Have you ever taken notice of fences while passing through rural or small-town Armenia? What, if anything, do you recall?
Authors: Maria Gunko
Location: Russia
Themes: Infrastructure, Postsocialism, Statecraft, Statehood, Violence
While the war in Ukraine is making the 'fast' spectacular violence of the Russian state increasingly evident, the latter's 'slow' violence has largely remained out of the spotlight. Drawing on various data sources, this essay discusses the different yet co-existing sets of state practices – statecraft and statehood. It portrays a more nuanced picture of state violence expressed by the Russian state both against Ukraine and against its own citizens within Russia.
Authors: Maria Gunko
Location: Russia
Themes: Capitalism, Infrastructure, Sociality
The decaying post-Soviet mining cities are vivid illustrations of the on-going realignment of power relations after the end of the Cold War. As such they are both manifestations of new capitalism forms and platforms for the emergence of collective survival strategies, as urban anthropologist Maria Gunko argues in her contribution to the BG’s “After Extractivism” text series.
Authors: Dace Dzenovska, Daniel M. Knight
Location: Bosnia, China, Croatia, France, Greece, Hungary, India, Latvia, United Kingdom
Themes: Capitalism, Infrastructure, Materiality, The City, The Future
This series argues that emptiness is emerging as a concrete spatial-temporal coordinate in the global landscape of capitalism and state power, and a heuristic device of political struggles.
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.