Keyplaces

David Harvey has said that if Raymond Williams were to write his Keywords today, then space would be one of the key words next to ‘nature’ and ‘culture’. Similarly, we might say if Raymond Williams were to write his The Country and the City today, the spatial categories would be entirely different. Perhaps they would be “urban agglomerations” and “operational landscapes”, as Neil Brenner and Nikos Katsikis suggest, or “territories and terrains”, following Stuart Elden. But, as Tim Ingold and Gáston Gordillo remind us, whether landscapes or terrains, spatial entities are first and foremost experienced places. Moreover, people use vernacular categories, such as emptiness in eastern Latvia, to lend meaning to their emplaced experience. In this talk, I will build on comparative ethnographic work on emptiness to think about the keyplaces—rather than keyspaces—of our times, whether one understands “our times” as late liberal/capitalist modernity, anthropocene, or thanatocene. Where and how does one see the emerging spatialities of our times? What forms of power produce them? Are there unruly places that disturb dominant power configurations? Which places are of concern and to whom? And what about those places that are of no concern? Which vernacular and analytical spatial categories are most useful for understanding contemporary configurations of place, space and power?

Dace Dzenovska is Associate Professor of Anthropology of Migration at the University of Oxford. She is the author of School of Europeanness: Tolerance and Other Lessons in Political Liberalism in Latvia (Cornell, 2018) and the Principal Investigator of the ERC project "Emptiness: Living Capitalism and Democracy After Postsocialism". She is also working on a book manuscript entitled Empires We Choose: Tales of Migration and Sovereignty from Europe's Peripheries.