D Dzenovska
Biographic Data
| ID | 19439 |
|---|---|
| NAME | D Dzenovska |
| GIVEN NAMES | D |
| FAMILY NAME | Dzenovska |
| SIGNATURE | DZENOVSKA D |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Oxford |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5964-1804 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 22 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 179 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 22 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2010 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Against security: Protectionism and what's left of politics
The specter of security is haunting politics. In “north” and “south,” on left and right, security is replacing neoliberalism as a dominant political logic. Despite a wealth of securitization studies, we have not yet fully grasped this shift and its political ramifications. Here we consider security's rise to dominance in three contexts: first, the “postsocialist transition” in Latvia and the demise of Soviet socialism, which facilitated the wider…
The security-safety nexus: A response to comments
Setha Low, Mark Maguire, and Zoltán Glück have given us plenty to think about, but taken together, their commentaries also demonstrate why our intervention is needed. To put it briefly, Glück's insistence on fighting security through safety is an exemplary case of the type of thinking that we challenge by focusing on shared political logics across divergent contexts. In turn, Low and Maguire's argument for more ethnographic grounding would be wel…
The place and space of emptiness: An experiment in collaborative ethnographic comparison
Emptiness is a term used by residents of eastern Latvia to describe life in places that are losing their constitutive elements, such as people, jobs, schools, shops, and transport connections. In this article, we transform the emic term "emptiness" into a portable analytic and undertake ethnographic comparison of resonant processes and experiences in eastern Latvia, eastern Ukraine, and the Russian Far East. We argue that emptiness is both a hist…
Good enough sovereignty, or on land as property and territory in Latvia
After European Union expansion in the 2000s, Danish farmers went eastward in search of cheap land. In Latvia, they encountered indebted farmers and impoverished rural residents who readily sold their land, while at the same time harbouring resentment towards 'the Dane' for undermining Latvia's sovereignty. In the view of significant segments of the Latvian public, ownership of land and territorial rule were intricately linked. In the view of 'the…
On Violence: A Response to Comments
This a reply to Emanuela Grama’s and Kevin Platt’s comments to my article “Emptiness Against Decolonization: Reflections from the Imperial Fault Line in eastern Latvia.”
Emptiness against Decolonization: Reflections from the Imperial Fault Line in Eastern Latvia
With the Russo-Ukrainian war, the language of decolonization has become central to scholarship on eastern Europe. Yet, residents of Lielciems in eastern Latvia find it hard to orient in a political field defined by the binary of colonized and the colonizer. They live in a place that is losing its constitutive elements due to a variety of other "de" processes-deindustrialization, depopulation, and devaluation. They live amidst absences rather than…
Triangulation: An imperial power device
Drawing on Katherine Verdery’s Transylvanian villagers and fieldwork in Latvia, this article discusses triangulation as an imperial power device whereby one actor makes an alliance with another to influence a third. The social and political field within which triangulation is deployed is not a flat world of nation-states or networks, but a three-dimensional social and political field. The actors involved are not of the same kind (e.g., ethnic gro…
Between loss and opportunity: The fate of place after postsocialism
Many places in the post-socialist world undergo emptying: a loss of their constitutive elements—people, infrastructure, services, and futures past. Some people see this emptying as a loss, others as an opportunity. We argue that the shift from loss to opportunity—or vice versa—is a site of the political, that is, a moment of decision about the place of the present in a framework of meaning that gives form and direction to life. Drawing on contrib…
The clash of sovereignties: The Latvian subject and its Russian imperialism
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is occupying the minds of pundits, scholars, and politicians worldwide and across the political spectrum. In the midst of these discussions, Eastern European voices have mobilized around claims to sovereignty as the ability to make choices about which alliances to join and claims to knowledge about the nature of Russian imperialism. In this essay, I analyze the claims to sovereignty and knowledge from the perspective …
Liberalism in the breach
This afterward draws together insights from the articles in the special section on liberalism and points to a growing disjuncture between the liberalism of those who claim to represent liberalism and the liberalism of those who are accused of illiberalism even as they engage in a variety of liberal practices. The articles suggest that it is important to look for capillary liberal practices in the shadows of the current liberal battlegrounds. This…
Emptiness: Capitalism without people in the Latvian countryside
In Latvian towns and villages, post-Soviet capitalism has produced a palpable change that locals describe as "emptiness." People point to empty houses and apartments, and they list friends and relatives who have left. They fear school closures and the cancellation of transportation routes. They imagine the future as an entirely different world, one in which they will play no part. As a social formation, emptiness consists of (1) an observable rea…
Recenzija: School of Europeanness: Tolerance and Other Lessons in Political Liberalism in Latvia
Population displacement in Lithuania in the twentieth century: Experiences, identities and legacies (On the boundary of two worlds: identity, freedom, and moral imagination in the Baltics, Vol. 43)
Emptiness and its futures
In the past 25 years, rural Latvia has become notably emptier. This emptying is the result of post-Soviet deindustrialization and large-scale outmigration, enabled by EU accession and exacerbated by the 2008 financial crisis. It is accompanied by lack of political protest, leading many to conclude that migration hinders political mobilization. Such conclusions derive from viewing leaving and staying as actions in relation to the state. Instead, l…
Coherent Selves, Viable States: Eastern Europe and the “Migration/Refugee Crisis
This essay argues that what is at stake in debates about the difference between eastern and western Europe in the context of migration and asylum politics is the definition of a politically- and ethically-acceptable threshold of “too many,” which takes on concrete contours in relation to historically-formed understandings of coherent selves and viable polities. The argument derives from placing analysis of the alleged political and ethical failur…
Brexit Referendum: First reactions from anthropology
Brexit Referendum: first reactions from anthropologyMy immediate reaction to the results of the British Referendum on leaving or remaining in the EU was to remember Alexei Yurchak's book, Everything was forever, until it was no more (Yurchak 2006).In the book, Yurchak describes the feeling of many people in Russia when the Soviet Union broke up: it came as a complete shock because they thought it would never happen; but once it had happened, it w…
Bordering encounters, sociality and distribution of the ability to live a ‘normal life’: Bordering Encounters
Based on analysis of a bordering encounter that took place in the offices of the Latvian State Border Guard, I trace how bordering produces connections at the same time as it effects separations. Despite being separated by state-based lines of power, participants of the bordering encounter - all former Soviet citizens - recognised each other as 'normal people' striving to obtain a 'normal life'. This connection was enabled by historically formed …
Practices and Politics of Rural Living in Latvia: An Interdisciplinary View
Project Nr.2009/0222/1DP/1.1.1.2.0/09/APIA/VIAA/087.Additional informationNotes on contributorsDace DzenovskaDace Dzenovska holds a PhD and an MA in Social Cultural Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley, and an MA in Social Theory from New York University. She is currently a Senior Researcher/Marie Curie Fellow at the Centre on Migration, Policy and Society, University of Oxford. Her research interests pertain to the politics o…
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Historical agency and the coloniality of power in postsocialist Europe
In this article, I analyse the ways in which coloniality as a racialized and racializing rationality of government and knowledge production shapes political and historical subjects in postsocialist Europe. I analyse Latvian attempts to establish historical presence in European modernity through appropriation of 17th-century colonial pursuits of the Duchy of Courland into Latvian national history, as well as interpretations of this historical appr…
Don't Fence Me In: Barricade Sociality and Political Struggles in Mexico and Latvia
In 1991, barricades in the streets of Rīga, Latvia, shielded important landmarks from Soviet military units looking to prevent the dissolution of the USSR; in 2006, barricades in the streets of Oaxaca, Mexico, defended members of the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca from paramilitary incursions. We employ these two cases to compare the historically specific public socialities and politics formed through spatial and material practices in …
Public Reason and the Limits of Liberal Anti-Racism in Latvia
My paper is a critical analysis of anti-racist and tolerance promotion initiatives in Latvia. First, I trace the historical and geopolitical conditions that enable the emergence of two discursive positions that are central to arguments about racism - that of liberally inclined tolerance activists and that of Latvians with politically objectionable nationalist sensibilities. Subsequently, I argue that, plagued by developmentalist thinking, anti-ra…
Emptiness: Capitalism without people in the Latvian countryside
In Latvian towns and villages, post-Soviet capitalism has produced a palpable change that locals describe as "emptiness." People point to empty houses and apartments, and they list friends and relatives who have left. They fear school closures and the cancellation of transportation routes. They imagine the future as an entirely different world, one in which they will play no part. As a social formation, emptiness consists of (1) an observable rea…
Historical agency and the coloniality of power in postsocialist Europe
In this article, I analyse the ways in which coloniality as a racialized and racializing rationality of government and knowledge production shapes political and historical subjects in postsocialist Europe. I analyse Latvian attempts to establish historical presence in European modernity through appropriation of 17th-century colonial pursuits of the Duchy of Courland into Latvian national history, as well as interpretations of this historical appr…
Brexit Referendum: First reactions from anthropology
Brexit Referendum: first reactions from anthropologyMy immediate reaction to the results of the British Referendum on leaving or remaining in the EU was to remember Alexei Yurchak's book, Everything was forever, until it was no more (Yurchak 2006).In the book, Yurchak describes the feeling of many people in Russia when the Soviet Union broke up: it came as a complete shock because they thought it would never happen; but once it had happened, it w…
Emptiness and its futures
In the past 25 years, rural Latvia has become notably emptier. This emptying is the result of post-Soviet deindustrialization and large-scale outmigration, enabled by EU accession and exacerbated by the 2008 financial crisis. It is accompanied by lack of political protest, leading many to conclude that migration hinders political mobilization. Such conclusions derive from viewing leaving and staying as actions in relation to the state. Instead, l…
Don't Fence Me In: Barricade Sociality and Political Struggles in Mexico and Latvia
In 1991, barricades in the streets of Rīga, Latvia, shielded important landmarks from Soviet military units looking to prevent the dissolution of the USSR; in 2006, barricades in the streets of Oaxaca, Mexico, defended members of the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca from paramilitary incursions. We employ these two cases to compare the historically specific public socialities and politics formed through spatial and material practices in …
Coherent Selves, Viable States: Eastern Europe and the “Migration/Refugee Crisis
This essay argues that what is at stake in debates about the difference between eastern and western Europe in the context of migration and asylum politics is the definition of a politically- and ethically-acceptable threshold of “too many,” which takes on concrete contours in relation to historically-formed understandings of coherent selves and viable polities. The argument derives from placing analysis of the alleged political and ethical failur…
Public Reason and the Limits of Liberal Anti-Racism in Latvia
My paper is a critical analysis of anti-racist and tolerance promotion initiatives in Latvia. First, I trace the historical and geopolitical conditions that enable the emergence of two discursive positions that are central to arguments about racism - that of liberally inclined tolerance activists and that of Latvians with politically objectionable nationalist sensibilities. Subsequently, I argue that, plagued by developmentalist thinking, anti-ra…
Practices and Politics of Rural Living in Latvia: An Interdisciplinary View
Project Nr.2009/0222/1DP/1.1.1.2.0/09/APIA/VIAA/087.Additional informationNotes on contributorsDace DzenovskaDace Dzenovska holds a PhD and an MA in Social Cultural Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley, and an MA in Social Theory from New York University. She is currently a Senior Researcher/Marie Curie Fellow at the Centre on Migration, Policy and Society, University of Oxford. Her research interests pertain to the politics o…
The place and space of emptiness: An experiment in collaborative ethnographic comparison
Emptiness is a term used by residents of eastern Latvia to describe life in places that are losing their constitutive elements, such as people, jobs, schools, shops, and transport connections. In this article, we transform the emic term "emptiness" into a portable analytic and undertake ethnographic comparison of resonant processes and experiences in eastern Latvia, eastern Ukraine, and the Russian Far East. We argue that emptiness is both a hist…
Emptiness against Decolonization: Reflections from the Imperial Fault Line in Eastern Latvia
With the Russo-Ukrainian war, the language of decolonization has become central to scholarship on eastern Europe. Yet, residents of Lielciems in eastern Latvia find it hard to orient in a political field defined by the binary of colonized and the colonizer. They live in a place that is losing its constitutive elements due to a variety of other "de" processes-deindustrialization, depopulation, and devaluation. They live amidst absences rather than…
Public Reason and the Limits of Liberal Anti-Racism in Latvia
My paper is a critical analysis of anti-racist and tolerance promotion initiatives in Latvia. First, I trace the historical and geopolitical conditions that enable the emergence of two discursive positions that are central to arguments about racism - that of liberally inclined tolerance activists and that of Latvians with politically objectionable nationalist sensibilities. Subsequently, I argue that, plagued by developmentalist thinking, anti-ra…
Don't Fence Me In: Barricade Sociality and Political Struggles in Mexico and Latvia
In 1991, barricades in the streets of Rīga, Latvia, shielded important landmarks from Soviet military units looking to prevent the dissolution of the USSR; in 2006, barricades in the streets of Oaxaca, Mexico, defended members of the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca from paramilitary incursions. We employ these two cases to compare the historically specific public socialities and politics formed through spatial and material practices in …
Historical agency and the coloniality of power in postsocialist Europe
In this article, I analyse the ways in which coloniality as a racialized and racializing rationality of government and knowledge production shapes political and historical subjects in postsocialist Europe. I analyse Latvian attempts to establish historical presence in European modernity through appropriation of 17th-century colonial pursuits of the Duchy of Courland into Latvian national history, as well as interpretations of this historical appr…
Bordering encounters, sociality and distribution of the ability to live a ‘normal life’: Bordering Encounters
Based on analysis of a bordering encounter that took place in the offices of the Latvian State Border Guard, I trace how bordering produces connections at the same time as it effects separations. Despite being separated by state-based lines of power, participants of the bordering encounter - all former Soviet citizens - recognised each other as 'normal people' striving to obtain a 'normal life'. This connection was enabled by historically formed …
Practices and Politics of Rural Living in Latvia: An Interdisciplinary View
Project Nr.2009/0222/1DP/1.1.1.2.0/09/APIA/VIAA/087.Additional informationNotes on contributorsDace DzenovskaDace Dzenovska holds a PhD and an MA in Social Cultural Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley, and an MA in Social Theory from New York University. She is currently a Senior Researcher/Marie Curie Fellow at the Centre on Migration, Policy and Society, University of Oxford. Her research interests pertain to the politics o…
Reply to comments: Reply to Comments
Brexit Referendum: First reactions from anthropology
Brexit Referendum: first reactions from anthropologyMy immediate reaction to the results of the British Referendum on leaving or remaining in the EU was to remember Alexei Yurchak's book, Everything was forever, until it was no more (Yurchak 2006).In the book, Yurchak describes the feeling of many people in Russia when the Soviet Union broke up: it came as a complete shock because they thought it would never happen; but once it had happened, it w…
Coherent Selves, Viable States: Eastern Europe and the “Migration/Refugee Crisis
This essay argues that what is at stake in debates about the difference between eastern and western Europe in the context of migration and asylum politics is the definition of a politically- and ethically-acceptable threshold of “too many,” which takes on concrete contours in relation to historically-formed understandings of coherent selves and viable polities. The argument derives from placing analysis of the alleged political and ethical failur…
Recenzija: School of Europeanness: Tolerance and Other Lessons in Political Liberalism in Latvia
Population displacement in Lithuania in the twentieth century: Experiences, identities and legacies (On the boundary of two worlds: identity, freedom, and moral imagination in the Baltics, Vol. 43)
Emptiness and its futures
In the past 25 years, rural Latvia has become notably emptier. This emptying is the result of post-Soviet deindustrialization and large-scale outmigration, enabled by EU accession and exacerbated by the 2008 financial crisis. It is accompanied by lack of political protest, leading many to conclude that migration hinders political mobilization. Such conclusions derive from viewing leaving and staying as actions in relation to the state. Instead, l…
Emptiness: Capitalism without people in the Latvian countryside
In Latvian towns and villages, post-Soviet capitalism has produced a palpable change that locals describe as "emptiness." People point to empty houses and apartments, and they list friends and relatives who have left. They fear school closures and the cancellation of transportation routes. They imagine the future as an entirely different world, one in which they will play no part. As a social formation, emptiness consists of (1) an observable rea…
Liberalism in the breach
This afterward draws together insights from the articles in the special section on liberalism and points to a growing disjuncture between the liberalism of those who claim to represent liberalism and the liberalism of those who are accused of illiberalism even as they engage in a variety of liberal practices. The articles suggest that it is important to look for capillary liberal practices in the shadows of the current liberal battlegrounds. This…
The clash of sovereignties: The Latvian subject and its Russian imperialism
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is occupying the minds of pundits, scholars, and politicians worldwide and across the political spectrum. In the midst of these discussions, Eastern European voices have mobilized around claims to sovereignty as the ability to make choices about which alliances to join and claims to knowledge about the nature of Russian imperialism. In this essay, I analyze the claims to sovereignty and knowledge from the perspective …
Between loss and opportunity: The fate of place after postsocialism
Many places in the post-socialist world undergo emptying: a loss of their constitutive elements—people, infrastructure, services, and futures past. Some people see this emptying as a loss, others as an opportunity. We argue that the shift from loss to opportunity—or vice versa—is a site of the political, that is, a moment of decision about the place of the present in a framework of meaning that gives form and direction to life. Drawing on contrib…
Good enough sovereignty, or on land as property and territory in Latvia
After European Union expansion in the 2000s, Danish farmers went eastward in search of cheap land. In Latvia, they encountered indebted farmers and impoverished rural residents who readily sold their land, while at the same time harbouring resentment towards 'the Dane' for undermining Latvia's sovereignty. In the view of significant segments of the Latvian public, ownership of land and territorial rule were intricately linked. In the view of 'the…
On Violence: A Response to Comments
This a reply to Emanuela Grama’s and Kevin Platt’s comments to my article “Emptiness Against Decolonization: Reflections from the Imperial Fault Line in eastern Latvia.”
Emptiness against Decolonization: Reflections from the Imperial Fault Line in Eastern Latvia
With the Russo-Ukrainian war, the language of decolonization has become central to scholarship on eastern Europe. Yet, residents of Lielciems in eastern Latvia find it hard to orient in a political field defined by the binary of colonized and the colonizer. They live in a place that is losing its constitutive elements due to a variety of other "de" processes-deindustrialization, depopulation, and devaluation. They live amidst absences rather than…
Triangulation: An imperial power device
Drawing on Katherine Verdery’s Transylvanian villagers and fieldwork in Latvia, this article discusses triangulation as an imperial power device whereby one actor makes an alliance with another to influence a third. The social and political field within which triangulation is deployed is not a flat world of nation-states or networks, but a three-dimensional social and political field. The actors involved are not of the same kind (e.g., ethnic gro…
The place and space of emptiness: An experiment in collaborative ethnographic comparison
Emptiness is a term used by residents of eastern Latvia to describe life in places that are losing their constitutive elements, such as people, jobs, schools, shops, and transport connections. In this article, we transform the emic term "emptiness" into a portable analytic and undertake ethnographic comparison of resonant processes and experiences in eastern Latvia, eastern Ukraine, and the Russian Far East. We argue that emptiness is both a hist…
Against security: Protectionism and what's left of politics
The specter of security is haunting politics. In “north” and “south,” on left and right, security is replacing neoliberalism as a dominant political logic. Despite a wealth of securitization studies, we have not yet fully grasped this shift and its political ramifications. Here we consider security's rise to dominance in three contexts: first, the “postsocialist transition” in Latvia and the demise of Soviet socialism, which facilitated the wider…
The security-safety nexus: A response to comments
Setha Low, Mark Maguire, and Zoltán Glück have given us plenty to think about, but taken together, their commentaries also demonstrate why our intervention is needed. To put it briefly, Glück's insistence on fighting security through safety is an exemplary case of the type of thinking that we challenge by focusing on shared political logics across divergent contexts. In turn, Low and Maguire's argument for more ethnographic grounding would be wel…
Political science (15 works) · Politics (15 works) · Sociology (14 works) · Law (13 works) · Political economy (9 works) · Law (7 works) · Epistemology (6 works) · History (6 works) · History (5 works) · Philosophy (5 works)