Senior Research Seminar 14th November with Professor Madeleine Reeves (University of Oxford)

Senior Research Seminar 14th November with Professor Madeleine Reeves (University of Oxford)

 

Ashar: politicising shelter and its absence in a state ‘without homelessness’ 

 

How to make homelessness visible in a country where it officially did not exist? In the capital of the Kyrgyz Soviet Socialist Republic, Frunze, this question came to be of urgent importance at the end of the 1980s, as young people, many of whom had spent years living unregistered in barracks, outhouses, or dormitories, began demanding land for housing from the socialist state. The vast majority of these autonomous house-builders were rural born, their lack of urban propiska meaning that they were unable officially to join the housing queue in what was, by the late 1980s, a majority Russian city. This talk draws on archival, memoir and ethnographic research with members of the house-builders movement, ashar , to tell a story of perestroika from the provinces that has as of yet received little attention in comparative scholarship. Rather than situating movements such as ashar simply as copies of anti-communist movements that had emerged elsewhere during perestroika, this paper shows how campaigners for housing justice understood themselves as fulfilling the promise of perestroika through a renewed socialism in which all young people would have the right to the socialist city.

 

Madeleine Reeves is Professor in the Anthropology of Migration at the University of Oxford. She was previously Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester and Editor of Central Asian Survey. She is the author of Border Work: Spatial Lives of the State in Rural Central Asia (Cornell 2014) and the co-editor, most recently, of The Everyday Lives of Sovereignty (Cornell 2021) with Rebecca Bryant.