We are glad to invite you to the very first event of LIFEMAKE Seminar Series, which will take place online, on Tuesday 20.2. at 15-16.

Andrei Vazyanau (European University of Humanities) will speak on the topic of “Property as a problem: responses to dispossesion among repressed Belarusians”.

‘Abstract:
After the rigged presidential election of August 2020 and brutal suppression of the protests that followed, Belarus is facing arguably the most massive repressions in Europe since the breakup of the Soviet Union. Along with dozens of thousands of imprisonments and mass exodus from the country – with more than 5% of the population leaving within three years – the repressions redefine how Belarusians, both within Belarus and in exile, perceive and manage their possessions. My ethnographic research focuses on the materiality of forced relocations, as a danger and a reality, in the intersecting contexts of domestic mass repressions and increasingly austere EU humanitarian policies – aggravated, in Belarusian case, by legal restrictions imposed on Belarus citizens as a consequence of Russian invasion into Ukraine. Asking Belarusians for lists and descriptions of the objects they retain, wander with, or leave behind, I analyze the implications of their forced mobility that extend beyond the debates on the moral rights of particular social groups for refuge. Also, my research explores the tactics that relocated people use in order to decrease their dependence on things, especially new things, in their homemaking efforts. Additionally, I am tracing how restrictions on the circulation of objects across the borders of Belarus instigates the breakage of connections within (solidary) families and collectives.

Andrei Vazyanau is a lecturer at European Humanities University (Vilnius, Lithuania) and a researcher at Minsk Urban Platform (Belarus/Lithuania). He holds his PhD in social anthropology from the University of Regensburg (2021, the title of the project „Infrastructures in Trouble: Public Transit, Crisis, and Citizens at the Peripheries of Europe“). His fieldwork background includes the Donetsk region of Ukraine (Mariupol, Kostyantynivka, Druzhkivka, Horlivka), years 2011-2013; Romania (Galati, Braila, Constanta), years 2015-2016; Belarus (Minsk), 2017-2021. His latest research focused on different aspects of life in post-2020 Belarus such as the use of new media, psychotherapeutic practice, dispossessions, and intimate relationships.

Please register to receive a Zoom-meeting invitation later: https://elomake.helsinki.fi/lomakkeet/128086/lomake.html

We are looking forward to seeing you at the seminar!