"Emptiness: Ways of Seeing" Conference 2021 - Roundtable 1: Emptiness, Space, Capital and the State

This roundtable will consider the contours of emptiness by examining the shifting relationships between people, place, capital, and the state. It will aim to combine macro-level analysis of how the presence or absence of capital and the state shapes lives with perspectives from the affected places by addressing the following questions: What are the limits and possibilities of the existing analytical tools for understanding abandonment of people and places? What, if anything, is new about today’s ‘emptying’ compared to other historical instances of abandonment? What do attempts to reconnect – for example, via desire for tourism or foreign investment – tell about the spatial configurations of contemporary capitalism? What could a perspective from the postsocialist context add to the analysis of space, capital, and the state? Is emptying a transitional moment, when afterlives of postsocialism are preventing commodification or is this a reflection of contemporary capitalism working via expulsion of space rather than expansion in space?

Moderators: Volodymyr Artiukh and Dace Dzenovska, University of Oxford
Participants:
Saskia Sassen, Columbia University
Johanna Bockman, George Mason University
Don Kalb, University of Bergen
Martin Demant Frederiksen, Aarhus University