Tartu Conference on East European and Eurasian Studies
Keynote Speaker
Keynote speech: Empires We Choose: Migration and Sovereignty in a Double Periphery
June 11, 16:45-18:15
“Based on a forthcoming book of the same title, I tell the story of how Latvians switched empires in pursuit of sovereignty by redirecting migration imaginaries and pathways from East to West. In this complex process that lasted more than a century, present-day Latvia turned from a western periphery of the Russian Empire and later the Soviet Union into an eastern periphery of the European Union and the Euro-Atlantic world. It turned from a place of emigration into a place of immigration and back again. Former subordinates became dominant majorities, and former agents of empire became subalterns. In this story of imperial reorientation, some forms of dependency are seen as freedom, while others, as domination. I pose the question of whether, from the perspective of a double periphery, freedom’s just another word for the empire one chooses.”
Dace Dzenovska is Associate Professor in Anthropology of Migration at the University of Oxford. She researches the changing relations between people, place, state, and capital in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. She is the author of School of Europeanness: Tolerance and Other Lessons in Political Liberalism in Latvia (Cornell, 2018), and the lead author of Living Emptiness: Place, Power, and Meaning-Making from the Baltic to the Russian Far East (forthcoming with Stanford University Press, 2026). She is completing a book entitled Empires We Choose: Migration and Sovereignty in a Double Periphery for Cornell University Press. Her articles have appeared in American Ethnologist, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Social Anthropology, Cultural Anthropology, HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, Slavic Review, Focaal, History and Anthropology, among others.
