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 an Associate Professor in the Anthropology of Migration at the University of Oxford. Her research interests pertain to the changing relationships between people, place, state, and capital in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. To that end, she has studied how residents of Latvia were summoned to change their understandings of self and community via European Union-supported tolerance promotion projects. This resulted in the book School of Europeanness: Tolerance and Other Lessons in Political Liberalism in Latvia (Cornell, 2018). Currently, she is completing two books: a book about migration and sovereignty in an inter-imperial terrain entitled Empires We Choose: Migration and Sovereignty in a Double Periphery; and a digital-born multimodal book Emptiness: Keyplaces of Our Times, which is based on a collaborative and comparative ethnographic project in Latvia, Ukraine, Armenia, and Russia (http://www.emptiness.eu/). 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: Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology, among others.
