For the first leg of MeMuRu (months 1-3), I went on secondment to the University of Amsterdam's School for Regional, Transnational and European Studies, one of the major hubs for the study of Islam in the former Soviet space. This visit allowed me to gain insight into the fields of memory studies and the history of personhood and emotions. The main part of my MSCA (months 4-24) took me to the University of California Berkeley's Anthropology Department. My stay at Berkeley has allowed me not only considerably to expand my academic network, but also to train in a broad range of intellectual and methodological domains across disciplines, from philosophical and critical theory to area studies. Throughout my stay, I attended courses, workshops, and seminars organised by the Anthropology Department, the Institute of Slavic, Eastern European and Eurasian Studies, the Institute of Asian Studies’ Central Asia Working Group, and the Townsend Center. I have also become involved with Cal’s Humanities and Social Sciences Associations (HSSA), eventually taking on the position of HSSA’s Vice President - thereby broadening my skillset beyond the "stricly academic". In months 25-26, I was on secondment at the University of Cambridge's Anthropology Department and the Mongolia and Inner Asia Research Unit (MIASU). There, I worked with a group of researchers specialising in post-socialist Eurasia, as well as benefitting from scholarly activities on religion, ritual, and space & infrastructure. Lastly, in months 26-36 I worked at my return institution, Ca' Foscari University of Venice, becoming part of a lively scholarly community bringing together anthropologists, historians, and geographers, as well as Russia and MENA region specialists from neighbouring disciplines.
Although Covid-19 and the war in Ukraine partly disrupted plans to conduct fieldwork in Russia, the wealth of data that was already in my possession thanks to my long-term engagement with the Volga-Ural region meant that such disruptions did not critically affect MeMuRu's goals. This project allowed me successfully to document a variety of social, cultural, religious, and political dynamics at play among Volga-Ural Muslims. Particularly, I have focused on Muslims' relationships with state institutions, the capitalist marketplace, and the puglic at large, through an analysis of the main nodes in the Volga-Ural region's sometimes contested Islamic landscape, from heritage sites to halal infrastructures. I published six (for now) contributions between journal articles, book chapters, and commentaries aimed at different readerships, as well as writing a monograph that I expect to publish soon. I have disseminated my project's results at more than a dozen events, ranging from intimate specialist workshops, to large academic conferences, to public lectures - and I intend to keep engaging with interested parties both whithin and outside academia.
