Dissertation Work
"Russia outside Russia" as a metaphor for transnational Russian migration.
Summary
My dissertation followed my migration trajectory, as I traveled and interviewed educated Russian migrants in Moscow, Paris, Berlin, and New York about moving abroad. Forty-five of these conversations were recorded and edited into short stories, which became part of an interactive video and sound installation. Because there is a long history of emigration from Russia, there is also a strong tradition of writing about migration experiences in places such as Paris, Berlin, and New York. I compared these historical records about migration with present-day migration stories, examined through interviews. I also attempted to recreate my own migration journey by writing about my past using my own family photographs, memoirs, and material artifacts as mnemonic devices. Both the written and the video work considers how people search for personal fulfillment across different political contexts. The video work attempts to reach a wider audience by using creative and interactive storytelling methods.
Research Background
I was born in Moscow, in the former Soviet Union, in 1984. My family moved to Canada, and then to France when I was still a boy, but my memories of that time still loom large. This became signifant when I began my research, and when I travelled, my own journey impacted how I talked with Russian migrants in Moscow, Paris, Berlin and New York about their experience of migration. I recorded forty-five of these conversations on video, and edited them into short stories, which later became part of the interactive media installation, Still Life with a Suitcase.
Summary of Chapters
This research project investigates interrelated themes of mobility, material culture and historical and present-day narratives surrounding migration. Subsequent chapters examine my research sites (Chapter Two) and visual anthropology research methods (Chapter Three). Chapters that follow investigate the intersections between mobility and material culture (Chapter Four), explore how historical narratives about displacement resonate with present-day migrants (Chapter Five), and examine how these narratives are negotiated between intellectuals and official state discourses both inside and outside Russia (Chapters Five and Six).
The process of writing was accompanied by public presentations, conferences, peer-reviewed publications and film festivals, which I outline below.
Chapter One
In the first chapter, I analyze how Russian intellectuals in Russia and abroad, as well as scholars of Russian migration, strategically evoke reified categories of belonging—through such terms as “the intelligentsia,” “migration waves” or “diaspora”; categories, membership to which is flexible—to negotiate group boundaries and belonging within personal and social networks of a Russian community outside Russia.
While studying migration, which involves movement across state borders, I was particularly interested in exploring how space becomes a political entity. In 2012, Pussy Riot, an anarchist-feminist punk band, performed inside Christ the Saviour Cathedral. I analyzed this performance against Max Weber's thesis that "the fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the 'disenchantment of the world'". Titled "Soaring to Dizzying Heights: Christ the Saviour Cathedral as a Historical Arena for the Persecution of Pussy Riot," this work is published in Critique of Anthropology, 2015, Vol. 35(2), Pp. 166-186.
Read Chapter 1: Uncertain Space(s); Uncertain Time(s).
Chapter Two
I begin to develop the theme of transnational migration in Chapter Two, by approaching the study of mobility experientially. In my research, Moscow always served as a point of departure, allowing me to re-enact, albeit under very different circumstances, migration journeys undertaken by research participants through a variety of means, such as by airplane, train, bus, and automobile. Much of the chapter is devoted to “emplacing” my fieldwork sites, providing a kind of traveler’s log that foregrounds my conversations with research participants. I contextualize both these kinetic and static processes by asking research participants about their own migration journeys, and the places where they travel to, either through physical journeys, or in their imaginations.
Read Chapter 2: In Search of Lost Place: Situating Fieldwork within Mobile Terrains.
Chapter Three
In Chapter Three, I discuss my use of visual anthropology methods in wider conversation with multimedia ethnography and cinema studies. I describe how I combined audio and video recordings of my interviews with impressionistic recordings of places to which I traveled, both of which I utilized to produce a multi-media installation titled Still Life with a Suitcase (see Supplementary Materials, and Appendices A and B). I investigate how these recordings positioned me as a participant-observer carrying out a reflexive, ethnographic research project, and I also discuss how such methods permitted alternative modes of research dissemination.
In 2014, while chairing the Migration Network at the Liu Institute of Global Issues, I organzied a panel titled "Beyond Borders: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives on Migration," where I presented a paper titled "Moving Pictures: Representing Migration in Ethnographic Film." The research basis of this talk became Chapter 3 of my dissertation.
Chapter Four
I explore the theme of material culture as it relates to the theme of personal dispossession in Chapter Four, where I analyze metaphors of changing cultural identity in new material and cultural environments, ontological security in light of tumultuous biographical change, and the process of integrating diverse experiences into a cohesive life narrative.
I presented parts of Chapter Four at the Heritages of Migration: Moving Stories, Objects and Home conference in Buenos Aires, Argentina. My paper was titled "The Trope of the Suitcase: Narratives of Mobile Identities amongst Transnational Russian Migrants."
Chapter Five
While I describe the process of moving places with things, I also investigate the process of narrativizing the lived experience of migration. In Chapter Five, I turn to archival research, focusing on the way intellectual discourses have historically reproduced Russian literary representations of migration, beginning with literary narratives that followed the Russian Revolution of 1917. At the time of writing, my analysis reflected commemorations surrounding the Revolution’s centennial. Taking inspiration from this chance occurrence, I analyze how revolutionary intellectual discourses on exile, material privation and resistance to the state, have remained relevant amongst present-day Russian migrants, but also how such discourses have become coopted by Russian state strategists
Chapter Five was presented as a paper at the Young Researchers Conference: Centennial, Commemoration, Catastrophe, 1917-2017 as Past and Present in Russia and Beyond, in Cuma, Italy, in June 2017. The paper I presented was titled "'And with me, my Russia / I Bring along in a Traveling Bag': Literary and Ethnographic Narratives of Russian Exile and Emigration, Past and Present," which was later reworked for a special issue of Revolutionary Russia 32(1):154-179.
Chapter Six
Much has been said, and written, about Russian migration since the collapse of the Soviet Union. In Chapter Six, I explore ambivalent attitudes towards migration espoused by the current Russian administration, which simultaneously exalts Russian émigrés as heroes, and denounces them as traitors. In this chapter, I examine how state administrators, literary figures, cultural commentators, and pundits promote historical pan-Slavic migrant discourses and how Russian policy-makers position themselves in relation to neighbouring nation-states. I argue that current state strategies produce polarizing discourses that reflect an irredentist, primordial nationalism in a tense relationship with the outside Other. This chapter also explores how migrants abroad either denounce such polarizing discourses, or contribute to their production, negotiating their own identity and relationship with Russia. I conclude this research project with a few final remarks on a dispersed, pluralistic and mobile identity of contemporary Russian migration.
I presented the paper "Burning Bridges: Ambivalent Metaphors of Russian State Power as Seen through the Symbolism of Bridges as Contentious Political Spaces" at the conference BRIDGE: The Heritages of Connecting Places and Culturesset at the Ironbridge World Heritage Site, UK, in July 2017.
Multi-media work
As part of my dissertation, I created an interactive multi-media installation titled Still Life with a Suitcase. With some support, I hope to turn the installation into a multimedia digital archive on the material culture of migration, and the written work into an autoethnographic book project on Russian migration, past and present.
Published research
If you would like to learn more about my work, please do not hesitate to contact me.