Liminal Place-Making: Peripheral Senses and the Folds of Experience

Session Submission Type: Panel

Affiliate Organization: Soyuz-The Research Network for Post-Socialist Studies

Brief Description

This performative oral session brings together research practices, protagonists and places that defy and straddle the historical and geographical boundaries of Slavic, East European and

Eurasian lifeworlds. Taking a cue from Lisa Min’s work in North Korea and Central Asia, liminal places emerge as transitional, precarious, but very specific sites of liberation. Liminality becomes possibility, the embodiment of a relational field. Our approaches include “peripheral vision” - facilitating affective and narrative exchange in diasporic contexts, as well as sensorial exploration of the “texture” of life on the margins: as a forager, foreigner, artist, or refugee. We dive into sensorial experiments to connect contemporary wars to past wartimes, to work with unstable homelands, and to explore a redemptive understanding of utopia and ruination. We confront solidarities that individuals and groups develop, maintain, and pass on as they experience new identities, changes in border regimes and socio-political systems.



How do multi-sensory extensions of cognition create liminal places and actualize radical inner imaginaries originating in the folds of life experience? Our knowledge comes from porous environments, across the broader post-socialist space and its diasporic ramifications; from people, places and histories vnye - beyond ethnocentric, imperial, and colonial views that swirl our nebulous times and churn our feral homelands. Presentations trace fluid boundaries, from Balkan slopes to the inland of Donbas; uneasy coexistence, from the Caucasus to the Black Forest; from the Black Sea to Atlantic shores. Lost strands of history and experience appear when we use echolocation, collage, performance, polaroids, video, human bodies, and phones, in sometimes hushed, understated conversations. What kinds of liberation become possible when being, knowing and speaking from these fleeting, liminal places?

Sub Unit

• Anthropology, Cultural Studies

Chair

• Claudia Sadowski-Smith, Arizona State U

Papers

• Art Amid Displacement: Emerging War-Time Networks of Ukrainian Artists in Germany and Austria - Elizabeth Crim, U of Colorado at Boulder

• I Write to You from the Clouds - Natalia Fedorova, Smolny Beyond Borders

• ‘Good Russians’ Still Unwelcome: The Shift in Gendered Citizenship and Russian Experiences in Georgia - Gvantsa Gasviani, UC Irvine

• Off-site Heritage: Diasporic Intimacies with Feral Landscapes - Pauline Shongov, Harvard U; Maya Shopova, Harvard U

Discussant

• Anya Yermakova, Willamette U