Author Archives: Roman Urbanowicz

LIFEMAKE seminar: “Social Reproduction and Migration: Recentering the Margins, Expanding the Horizons”

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April 2, 16:00 – 17:00 (Helsinki time / EET) 

Zhivka Valiavicharska (Pratt Institute, New York)  

Social Reproduction and Migration: Recentering the Margins, Expanding the Horizons
 

In this talk I discuss questions emerging at the intersection of social reproduction, migration, and diasporic life, which to some extent move away from the literature on gender and immigration that sees migrants exclusively as a labor force. My discussion, emerging from the context of the challenges and struggles of migrant people in the United States, is driven by a set of questions beyond structural analyses of labor, welfare, and the law: What does the work of reproduction mean for precariously present people living in a state of prolonged or permanent suspension and under the impending possibility of expulsion? What are the meanings of “family,” “home,” and the labor that sustains community bonds when it is work that contends with the traumatic effects of uprooting, disruption, and loss? What does it take to sustain relationships within family, community, and lovers in legal conditions designed to restrict, sever, and punish even the most basic social and intimate bonds? How do we think of this work politically when it pushes against forces of cultural assimilation and historical erasure, of everyday hostility and xenophobia? By centering on the experiences of migrant people, the talk aims to broaden existing narratives of social reproduction. It highlights the tremendous political importance of reproductive, emotional, and care practices that persist on the margins of the system and explores their potentials for expanding our feminist histories, struggles, and social horizons. 

Zhivka Valiavicharska is a political theorist and art historian working on the social, cultural, and art histories of twentieth-century Bulgaria and Eastern Europe in their global and diasporic dimensions. She is Associate Professor at Pratt Institute, New York, and the author of Restless History: Political Imaginaries and their Discontents in Post-Stalinist Bulgaria (McGill University Press, 2021).

Registration link: https://elomake.helsinki.fi/lomakkeet/128992/lomake.html

LIFEMAKE seminar series: “Property as a problem” by Andrei Vazyanau on 20.02

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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!

LIFEMAKE Launch Seminar

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What makes social life going forward while the world is running into an abyss? In LIFEMAKE, we examine and come in dialogue with individuals and communities that continue to remake their lives in the context of forced displacement, crisis of living, attack on the poor, and persistent gendered, sexualised, classed, and racialised forms of oppression. The looming developments of the present have further highlighted what has been known for a long time: the labour of social reproduction – from caring for children and the elderly to sustaining horizontal networks and communities — has been central to the (re)making of human beings and collectivities.

In the project, we examine these processes in the current moment of the full-scale war in Ukraine and increased political repressions in Belarus and Russia, seeking conversations with other communities whose lives are caught up in the processes of ruination beyond the region.

We want to re-centre life-making and home-making labour from the margins of capitalist production and ask: what are the transformative and reparative capacities of research on social reproduction and life-making in times of displacement, austerity and the crisis of living? What issues, activities, processes and institutions should be critically revised and included in the analysis in this context? What is the role of scholarly work and knowledge production in times of collapse and ruination?

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Seminar programme (October 6, the Swedish School of Social Sciences (Snellmaninkatu 12), room 210)

14-15.30 – Panel discussion “Social Reproduction in the Ruins” (with Suvi Salmenniemi, Olga
Davydova-Minguet, Olga Filippova, Majda Hrženjak – moderated by Daria Krivonos)

15.30-16.00 – Coffee break

16.00-17.00 – Presentation of LIFEMAKE project (Daria Krivonos, Olga Tkach, Roman Urbanowicz, research partner – Pauliina Lukinmaa)

From 17 – Socialising and dinner (at own expense)
We are excited to think together about social reproduction and life-making, and pursue emancipatory feminist visions!