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/(s’ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre)) 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/(s’ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre)) funded entirely by the British Academy. We will be integrating her in our team in May 2023.
