Emptiness: Living Capitalism and Democracy After (Post)Socialism

Project Information

Emptiness

Grant agreement ID: 865976

DOI

10.3030/865976

Project closed

EC signature date 4 June 2020

Start date 1 September 2020

End date 28 February 2026

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 929 263,00

EU contribution

€ 1 929 263,00

Coordinated by

THE CHANCELLOR, MASTERS AND SCHOLARS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD
United Kingdom

Periodic Reporting for period 3 - Emptiness (Emptiness: Living Capitalism and Democracy After (Post)Socialism)

Reporting period: 2023-09-01 to 2025-02-28

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

This project studies emptiness as a specific social formation and as one of the most fundamental – yet least studied – developments in the landscape of contemporary capitalism, state power, and associated ideologies. We hear that more and more people live in cities, and there are many studies about global cities as command centres of the economy. We don’t hear as much that more cities are shrinking rather than growing, and we hear very little about the emptying spaces between cities at a time when signs of emptiness are increasingly common around the globe.

Today’s emptiness is not only increasingly common, but also new. Decline or abandonment of certain places have happened before. But most such events in the modern era have occurred as a result of production-based capitalism’s spatial fixes and within an overall narrative of progress. Today’s emptiness comes at a time dominated by finance capitalism and devoid of promises of better collective futures. Instead of being incorporated into the market economy and welfare networks, as was the case at the heyday of modernity, today people and places are expelled from circuits of capital and care of the state. Some people are able to move, while others are stuck in place. This makes the lived experience of emptiness strikingly new, on a variety of levels.

This project uses emptiness – a concrete historical formation – as a tool for relational comparison that leads to generalization. Our study is taking place in five sites where ethnographic research uses the 'portable analytic' of emptiness derived from the Latvian-Russian borderlands to engage in detailed analysis of the lived experiences, governance, and analytical purchase of postsocialist emptying and emptiness. These include: the Latvian-Russian borderlands, the Russian Far East, Armenia, Eastern Germany, and Ukraine (partly in Romania).

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

We assembled the project team between Oct 2020 and Sep 2021. We launched the project with an intensive period of reading and discussion, during which we established a shared analytical framework and fine-tuned the individual projects. This was an important stage for the project, because it ensured that there are synergies between sub-projects while retaining individual intellectual freedom for each team member. We developed an extensive reading list on topics related to the main research problem, which will serve as a basis for a course at the University of Oxford taught from Jan 2024 onward. The reading and discussion phase coincided with the COVID lockdown, thus we carried it out remotely.

In contrast, the Russo-Ukrainian war was and continues to be a violent interruption of the personal and professional lives of several of our team members. While the project had integrated war in Eastern Ukraine (raging since 2014) into its design, nobody was prepared for the Russian invasion of Ukraine on 24 Feb 2022. As a result, one team member relocated to Romania after 5 months of fieldwork in Ukraine, and another one shifted research from Russia to Armenia. Despite the turmoil, this did not derail the scientific goals of the project, but it did delay fieldwork and led us to refocus on the intersection of peace-time and war-time violence in producing emptiness. Moreover, it enabled us to see how emptiness - from abandoned factories to depopulated places - was mobilized for military operations. For example, abandoned factory buildings became military training grounds, and empty houses in frontline communities were occupied by soldiers.

Parallel to conducting fieldwork, we have worked on collective publications that lay out the theoretical foundations of our approach to emptiness. These are reflected in a co-authored introduction to a special issue on the politics of emptiness forthcoming in Focaal: The Journal of Global and Historical Ethnography, and a co-authored piece on the space of emptiness (currently under review). The Focaal special issue comes out of the project launch conference held in a hybrid form in Sep-Oct 2021, which was also the launch of our efforts to build an intellectual community concerned with emptiness beyond the immediate project team. This has been an extremely successful endeavour. We have forged a sound intellectual community, as reflected in the "Field Reports" section of our website that features guest contributions (https://emptiness.eu/field-reports/) as well as in the feedback we receive from colleagues who engage with our work, including the website.

The website, launched in early Feb 2021, is another of the project's achievements. It has proved to be much more successful than imagined. We continually receive feedback from people who learn about our project from the website and actively use it due to the field reports that we publish regularly. The website is also an excellent tool for communicating with our interlocutors. It is visually attractive, multilingual, and accessible. The website is also the place where we preview our conceptual and methodological innovations that are subsequently elaborated in project publications.

Team members have continued to publish while doing fieldwork. We have taken special care to publish blogs and op-ed pieces in order to communicate our work and findings to the communities we work with. This has been especially important in the context of the Russo-Ukrainian war. To that end, we have organized 2 field workshops, one in Romania and one in Armenia, and are planning to organize more. The project has successfully arrange to host a Ukrainian scholar at risk through the British Academy Researcher at Risk Fellowships scheme (https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/funding/researchers-at-risk-fellowships/) funded entirely by the British Academy. We will be integrating her in our team in May 2023.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

To date, one of our main achievements is to work out a method for collaborative ethnographic comparison. In contrast to collaborations that are launched after fieldwork and usually during the results dissemination stage, our collaboration takes place at all stages of research, from design to write-up. Same with comparison: we do not compare already produced results, but compare continuously - and laterally - throughout all stages of research. This is a very rewarding, but also a very challenging process, as it requires reflection on the epistemological and ontological assumptions of each researcher, as well as reshapes our common object of analysis in the process. We have achieved this through continuous conversation, cross-field visits, and co-writing. We have already published some texts on the method (see https://emptiness.eu/field-reports/emptiness-as-a-portable-analytic/) and more are forthcoming. This form of comparison allows us to assemble an archive of data beyond what would be available through individual research or on the basis of conventional comparison, which feeds into our theorization of emptiness.

Consequently, the next achievement is our theorization of emptiness as an historical formation and a spatial-temporal coordinate of the contemporary political and economic landscape. We have pushed against existing theories of space that cannot account for the spatial contours of emptiness that we encounter, and we are theorizing beyond the state of the art across several disciplines. As with method, we are publishing some insights into this continuously, but are expecting to publish a more comprehensive overview at the end of the project.

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