The book ‘Remains of the Soviet Past in Estonia. An Anthropology of Forgetting, Repair and Urban Traces’ has been published by UCL Press. Also, it has received the Early Career Award by the European Association of Social Anthropology in the category of Best Monograph.
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What happens to legacies that do not find any continuation? The author brings together a number of sites of interest to explore the vanquishing of the Soviet legacy in Estonia. The anthropological study of all these places shows that national identity and historical representations can be constructed in relation to waste and disrepair too, demonstrating also how we can understand generational change in a material sense.
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By adopting the tropes of “repair” and “waste”, this book innovatively manages to link various material registers from architecture, intergenerational relations, affect, museums with ways of making the past present.
Victor Buchli, Professor of Material Culture, UCL
This book comprises an endearingly transdisciplinary ethnography of post-socialist material culture and social change in Estonia. It defies disciplinary boundaries and shows how an attention to material relations and affective infrastructures might reinvigorate political theory.
Maria Mälksoo, Senior Lecturer, Brussels School of International Studies of the University of Kent
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Francisco jointed the University of Helsinki in May 2018; since then he has published three articles: ‘Doing nothing: Anthropology sits at the same table with contemporary art in Lisbon and Tbilisi’ (Ethnography) ‘Analogue Photo Booths in Berlin. A stage, a trap, a condenser and four shots for kissing the person you love’ (Anthropology and Photography); and ‘The Serendipity of Anthropological Practice’ (Anthropological Journal of European Cultures).
Also, Francisco has edited two books that will be published within the next months: ‘Repair, Brokenness, Breakthrough: Ethnographic Responses’ (Berghahn); ‘Common Grounds? Locating, Contesting and (Not) Defining European Anthropology’ (Berghahn). Currently, he is curating the exhibition ‘Objects of Attention’ at the Estonian Museum of Applied Arts and Design.