Research seminar with Emma Rimpiläinen: "Can mobility emplace? War and displacement from..."
Seminar
Date:Monday 3 March 2025
Time:13.00 – 14.30
Location:BB600
Research seminar with Emma Rimpiläinen: "Can mobility emplace? War and displacement from the Donbas since 2014"
Abstract:
In recent years, social scientists working in a variety of contexts have argued that displacement can occur "in place" (Ali 2024; Askland 2018; Chu 2006; Feldman 2021; Mollett 2014; Ramsay 2020). If this is so, what is the role of mobility in producing, sustaining, or resolving displacement? Taking the aftermath of the war in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region since 2014 as an ethnographic example, this presentation will show that mobility can be a tactic for overcoming displacement after place has broken down with the arrival or war and the departure of social networks, employment, the state, basic infrastructure, and, most importantly, the future.
Bio:
Dr Rimpiläinen holds a doctorate from the University of Oxford and is based at the IRES Institute for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Uppsala University. Her research examines mobility as it relates to the contemporary state, and also has interests in housing, materiality and historical anthropology. She has conducted extended ethnographic fieldwork in several cities in both Ukraine and Russia, interviewing civilians who left their homes due to the war, as well as civil society actors, journalists, and bureaucrats.