2 Postdoctoral Researchers on the ‘Emptiness’ Project, School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK. Deadline: 23 September 2020.
University of Oxford is seeking up to two postdoctoral researchers for the European Research Council project “Emptiness: Living Capitalism and Democracy After (Post)Socialism.” The project will study the emptying cities, towns, and villages in Eastern Europe and Russia through the lens of “emptiness” as a concrete historical formation that has emerged in conditions when socialist modernity is gone and promises of capitalist modernity have failed. More specifically, it will: (1) study the experiences and narratives of emptiness and emptying; (2) examine the politics and governance of emptying and emptiness; and (3) use postsocialist “emptying” and “emptiness” as lenses for analysing global reconfigurations of relations between capital, the state, people, and place at a time when capital flows and statecraft are increasingly concentrated in “global cities,” with the rest of urban and non-urban spaces becoming radically disconnected.
If appointed, you will join a research team led by Dr Dace Dzenovska and hosted by the University of Oxford’s School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography and the Centre on Migration, Policy, and Society, Oxford. You will be responsible for developing and carrying out your own original project in Ukraine, Belarus, or Russia (other locations in the former socialist world may be considered) within the analytical frame of the project. You will undertake collaborative work with other team members, contribute to the refinement of the analytical frame, develop methodology, participate in cross-field visits, and produce outputs in the form of conference presentations, web material, journal articles, and a chapter for an edited volume. You may have the opportunity to teach in the field and/or in Oxford.
You are expected to spend the first 6 months preparing your research component in collaboration with other team members, based in Oxford at the Centre on Migration, Policy, and Society, Banbury Road Oxford (or remotely, if travel is not possible). Fieldwork in whichever country is relevant to your project is set to begin in the summer of 2021. The duration of the fellowship is 3.5 years, starting in January 2021 or as soon as possible thereafter.
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