I’m a PhD candidate in the history department of the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. My work focusses on property relations and moral economies in late Soviet urban mass housing districts. For this, I have done research on housing and urban sociality in St. Petersburg, Kyiv and Riga. In addition to social history and urban studies, my interests are in queer and feminist theory, film, and visual anthropology.
Project Statement:
Uncommonly Modern: Mass Housing, Moral Economy and Urban Social Change in the Late and Post-Soviet Period
My dissertation takes a housing lens to tell a bigger story of Soviet urbanization and industrialization, the collapse of the Soviet Union and neoliberal transformations in Riga. I’m interested in the situated lives of ordinary people moving to and living in late Soviet apartment blocks over the course of the 1970s, 80s and the 1990s. Such apartment blocks housed workers, who came to work for the Soviet enterprises in Riga. Many people from other Soviet republics settled in these newly built districts in pursuit of employment, friendship, community and family life and continued to live there throughout the 1990s. The aim of the project is to uncover class, family and gender relations in the late Soviet period, how they transformed in the 1990s following the closure of Soviet enterprises and the change-over to a market economy, and how such relations are entangled with the use and maintenance of public space and the built environment. I build on a variety of sources, such as oral history interviews with both Latvian and Russian-speaking inhabitants of the districts, newspaper articles, photographs, film material, and administrative documents. Ultimately, the project demonstrates that different types of social relations were inherently property relations. They emerged from differentiating histories of dispossession, from unequal access to resources, work and opportunities for social reproduction and from different narratives about deservingness.
