1,720,995 research outputs found
The present taxidermied: Soviet 'common unsaids' in Russian krayevedcheskiy museums
Get PDFThis dissertation analyses the current state of the krayevedcheskiy museums network in Russia against the backdrop of the historical development of a (post-) Soviet knowledge production system known as krayevedeniye. These museums constitute one of the largest cultural networks in the post-Soviet space, and their aim is to create a representation of the place in which they are located. In the dissertation I explore the principles underpinning the structure of their departments and uncover the common principles on which they are based, including those inherited from the period of Soviet governance. The research I present draws on two types of data: the archival documents of Soviet institutions supervising krayevedeniye which constructed the central ideology informing the curation of kraevedcheskiy museums’ expositions, and field data collected from 2014 to 2017 in seven regions and twenty-five regional and local museums, which allowed the common patterns of museum expositions and underlying theoretical principles to be excavated.
The main theoretical challenge of the thesis was to bring together relevant debates in geography and cognate sciences concerning wilderness and nature, post-colonial approaches to issues of domination and submissson and memory, including trauma, silences, erasing narratives and forgetting. I present a critical theory of krayevedeniye and place krayevedcheskiy museums in the context of museum studies. In order to bring these concepts together this study, I develop the concept of ‘common unsaids’, based on the Barthes’ myth-creation techniques, which have further been developed by Svetlana Boym. With the aim to contribute to debates around Soviet knowledge production, museum studies, representation of nature, and area studies, I analyse one of the largest museum network in the post-Soviet space. My intention is to broaden our knowledge of post-Soviet institutional development and to add new and important detail to our understanding of regional identity production in present-day Russia
The Geopolitics of Ethnic Relations in Russia: ethnic Russian and non-ethnic Russian citizens in Stavropol’skii krai
Get PDFEthnic relations are an important feature of contemporary Russia. This is especially true in the North Caucasus where ongoing insecurity combined with a depressed economy has led to growing Russian nationalism, xenophobia, and fears over immigration. In Stavropol’skii krai, the only ethnic Russian dominated territory in the North Caucasus Federal District, the situation is especially acute. In this thesis I investigate how the geopolitics of ethnic relations in Stavropol’skii krai, as part of the wider North Caucasus situation, impact on the everyday life of citizens in Stavropol’. I do this through employing an eclectic methodology, including both qualitative and quantitative techniques. Through four research papers, I explore how the built urban environment, through the politics of naming place (for example, street names and monuments), has become a space through which ethnic identity can be (re)produced and contested. I show how ethnic relations are (re)presented and performed in Stavropol’ through the Den’ kraya celebration, a performance that is based on a Soviet-era idealised framing of ethnic relations, and one which is open to challenge. I explore how in summer 2007 ethnic relations turned violent as ethnic Russian and non-ethnic Russian citizens rioted, and I attempt to explain the geopolitics surrounding this. Finally, I show how everyday ethnic relations have turned increasingly violent in Stavropol’ since 1991, drawing on reports from non-governmental organisations and independent researchers. I situate this research within the context of the changing ethnic geography of the krai since 1991. Together, this research represents a geopolitics of ethnic relations in Stavropol’skii krai
The topography of incarceration : the spatial continuity of penality and the legacy of the Gulag in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Russia
Get PDFThe aim of this article is to show how the penal estate inherited from the Soviet Union has reproduced specific penal experiences in the Russian Federation. The first part describes the evolution and current geographical structure of the penal estate showing how in the years immediately after Joseph Stalin’s death distinctive carceral regions became embedded in the Russian landscape. The second part discusses how this distinctive geography has become associated with a specific punishment form, “in exile imprisonment,” that merges incarceration with expulsion to the peripheries. In the final section it explores various ways that sending prisoners long distances to serve their sentences may be understood as punitive, adding to the familiar pains of imprisonment discussed by penal sociologists. The research on which this article is based emerges from two research projects conducted by the author among prisoners and their families during the past ten years. In English, extended summary in Russian
Dams of Damocles: between rivers, states, and geopolitics
Get PDFTheories of transboundary water politics have failed to explain the status quo in many river basins: fragile political relations between riparian states and nationalist domestic politics, as well as weak regional institutions and huge economic inefficiencies – but also an absence of wars over water. This is due to an uncritical approach to scale, power, and geopolitics. It is the purpose of this thesis to address these conceptual gaps by critically evaluating the multiple relationships between the logic of large dams and the politics of international rivers. The meaning of dams, the politics of their operation and construction, and their impact on international relations are much more ambiguous, opaque and complex than existing explanations have suggested so far. In turn, their logic influences, competes with, and contradicts the logic of river basin governance. Dams produce alternative spaces of development, energy, and state power that complement or are superimposed on existing spaces of riparian cooperation. This thesis argues that the contradictions between these spaces explains the geopolitical limbo of many international rivers in the developing world. Drawing from Foucault’s governmentality theory, the literature of critical geopolitics, and post-structural approaches to spatial scale the case-oriented research design of this thesis evaluates two geopolitical processes in contentious transboundary river basins: the construction of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam on the Nile and the operation of the Toktogul Dam in the Kyrgyz stretch of the Syr Darya River. By unpacking these processes, this thesis makes three substantial contributions to existing scholarship. Firstly, it is argued that regional river basin management is essentially a geopolitical project that contradicts the geo-economic imperatives of the dam. Secondly, power and agency in water politics is diffused far beyond the nation-state and can be understood in terms of “network effects”. Thirdly, to marry the concerns of the geopolitical and the geo-economic, I propose that the contrasting logics give rise to “geopolitical entrepreneurs” – actors who use geopolitics for wealth accumulation, legitimacy, nation-building, and other ends. While dams may provide power, wealth, and authority an allegorical Sword of Damocles is let down on the riparians
Planning the Soviet everyday: Reimagining the city, home and material culture of developed socialism
No full textThis thesis explores professional visions for the planning of everyday life during the period of developed socialism. Considering a wide range of disciplinary literature, including architecture, urban planning, design and sociology, this thesis analyses how professionals imagined residential and domestic life in an urbanised and technologically advanced socialist society. Continuing the narrative of Khrushchev’s modernising programme to reform everyday life (byt) into the post-Khrushchev period, the thesis follows professionals of the last two Soviet decades who criticised the rationalising and collectivising planning paradigm inaugurated during the preceding decades. Professionals argued that this paradigm had produced a dehumanised and alienating everyday environment in the city and the home. After setting out the theoretical framework and the historical context of developed socialism, the first empirical section addresses urban residential life. It focuses on the microdistrict planning unit to illustrate how professionals, disillusioned with functionalist planning, searched for ways to humanise the city and adapt it to the behaviours and needs of urban residents. Part two investigates shifting professional views on the home and the everyday processes associated with it, such as cooking and cleaning. No longer seen as a utilitarian space in which everyday processes transpire, the home came to be understood as a personal and emotionally resonant place. Part three focuses on material culture, investigating evolving views on consumption and aesthetics. It illustrates how professionals endeavoured to rehabilitate the object world and align it with populist preferences while nonetheless maintaining a commitment to technological and forward-looking principles. In contributing to the scholarly understanding of developed socialism, this thesis contends that the 1970s-1980s saw experts embrace individual agency and popular sentiments. This turn did not, however, signify a turn towards individualism or de-politicised malaise: professionals maintained their utopian aspirations to engineer and control everyday life
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Gendered coal struggles at the margins: The working lives of men, women and children in Soviet and post-Soviet Tajikistan
Get PDFThis thesis delves into the working lives of men, women and children in one village in Northern Tajikistan to unravel the way gendered geographies of exclusion have been produced/reproduced and transformed in a context of politico/economic and ecological change in the post-Soviet Muslim space. I draw on eight months of ethnographic work in the village of Kante, supplemented with life histories gathered during research in other semi-urban and rural areas in Tajikistan. In the post-Soviet extractive landscape of Kante, informal coalmining developed alongside male out-migration and the setting up of a Sino-Tajik mine after the fall of the Soviet Union. Work and resources are organized along gendered and generational lines, relegating the socially weaker groups to the most undesirable environments, and highlighting gendered and generational norms that make such exclusions possible. This thesis is guided by three research questions: first, why would women and men who experienced a certain degree of gender equality during the Soviet times accept and transmit gendered oppressive norms to the younger generations? Second, to what extent has the transformation of work practices impacted the process of gendered subjectification in Tajikistan? Finally, how do the broader resource struggles that have emerged with the start of the neoliberal global era also impact the gender subjectification process in Tajikistan? In answering these questions, this thesis first investigates post-Soviet gendered transformations in the Muslim South. It is situated as an academic and political project aimed at building alternative readings of gender and Muslimness in the world. Here, I challenge assumptions about Islam and the idea of an Islamic revival since the fall of the Soviet Union as the main causes of women’s oppression and the retraditionalization of the Tajik society. Instead, I argue that the cultural, religious, and what constitutes the ‘traditional’ is never fixed, but grounded in history, and always entangled, transformed, shaped by, as well as mobilized in the wake of broader politico-economic/ecological changes, and their local manifestations through the everyday work and resource struggles people engage with. I develop this argument by building a feminist postcolonial geography reading of work and resource struggles in the (post)Soviet Muslim South, which I then expand upon in four articles. The first article examines the project of women’s emancipation through work in Tajikistan, making visible the production of gendered and ethnic hierarchies through an examination of discourses on, and material experiences of, work during the Soviet past. The second article focuses on changing masculinities with broader and localized politico-ecological post-Soviet changes, transforming work and resource struggles, and their impact on women’s exclusion. The third article delves into women miners’ most intimate experiences of exclusion and marginalization by focusing on their abject/dirty work in mines. Finally, the last article focuses on questions of child labor and the intergenerational retransmission and renegotiation of gendered norms. By exploring these four themes, this thesis builds a holistic approach to the gender subjectification process in the post-Soviet Muslim South, and more generally in the Muslim South and makes three main contributions. It first expands on scholarship on gendered transformations in Central Asia, by complicating understandings of gender, generation, tradition and Muslimness in this context. Second, it contributes to broader feminist geographical literature on Muslim identities by – on one hand, provincializing research and focusing on the specificities of politico-ecological changes in the poorest countries of the Muslim Global South; and on the other hand, conceptualizing spatialized intersectionalities and agencies. Finally, this research contributes to feminist labor geography and feminist political ecology literature by reiterating the importance of exploring embodied gendered work and resource struggles as a window onto broader gendered exclusions
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
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