Emptiness and Placemaking in Small Armenian Towns

When Maria Gunko began her ethnographic fieldwork in a small Armenian town in late 2022, people in casual conversation would tell her that “there is nothing here” (stegh vochinch chka [ստեղ ոչինչ չկա]). This “nothingness” is similar to other local descriptors – emptiness, abandonment, ruination, lostness, etc. – found throughout the post-Soviet region and beyond. They pertain to life in places losing people, jobs, infrastructures, and welfare. Yet the “nothing here” does not mean an actual absence of things. It encompasses the condition of reordering, the changing relations between people, space, state, and capital after the collapse of state socialism. “Nothing” is actually “something,” produced by the combination of “shock therapy,” liberalisation, hectic privatisation, and the tensions of reterritorialisation.

In this presentation, Maria will lead us through her reading of a place that was described by its residents as being “created out of void” by the Soviet state and “collapsing back into void” after the dissolution of USSR. With the help of oral histories and participant observation, she will trace how these places are nevertheless kept habitable and recognizable by their inhabitants through constant practices of care and repair. She will also discuss the relevance of the extended Armenian family and diaspora in “placemaking.”

This event is held in collaboration with the Emptiness research project, hosted by the Centre on Migration, Policy & Society (COMPAS) in the School of Anthropology & Museum Ethnography (SAME) at the University of Oxford, UK, and the European Research Council.

Please note that all event tickets are sold online, no tickets are available at the door. To ensure a smooth experience for all attendees, please make sure to register in advance using Eventbrite.

About Maria Gunko

Maria Gunko holds an MSc and Kandidat Nauk (Russian postgraduate degree) in Human Geography. In 2022, she moved to Armenia and has worked for the Yerevan State University as a Visiting Professor. She was also a Visiting Fellow at the Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography (Leipzig) and at the Institute of Geography Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (Paris). Alongside work, since 2021, Maria has been reading towards the DPhil in Migration Studies at the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography University of Oxford. Her thesis is part of the ERC-funded project “Emptiness: living capitalism and democracy after post-socialism.” It focuses on place and placemaking in a small Armenian town and is based on a year of ethnographic fieldwork in one of the Northern provinces of Armenia.

Project EMPTINESS
Maria’s op-eds in EVN Report
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