3rd of December at 17:00 Tbilisi time the project “Tbilisi as an Urban Assemblage” (Funded by the Rustaveli Foundation) and Doctoral Program of Anthropology invite to a talk by Trine Brinkmann, PhD Anthropology, Assistant Professor, Department of Social Work, University College Copenhagen.
Title: “Conversations on Rubble: Urban Assemblages in a Danish Rural Periphery”
As a newcomer to Lolland, one quickly finds oneself engaged in conversations of what once was, and what is about to be. For decades the island has been understood in terms of socioeconomic marginalization, depopulation, and post-industrial decline. The historic developments having positioned Lolland at the Danish margins both relate to general (global) tendencies of urbanisation and centralization and to more particular aspects of Lolland’s regional past.
Currently the island, and its landscape, is undergoing a variety of changes that point to very different kinds of futures. On the one hand, the construction of the Fehmarn Belt Tunnel – a fixed link, connecting Denmark to Germany – is heavily influencing socioeconomic and demographic prospects, as well as local sceneries. On the other hand, new local peripheries are emerging and in some areas processes of depopulation are intensified. Here houses are being torn down and gardens turned into field, leaving only rubble or other forms of modest material expressions of, what once were. Taking my point of departure in such material modesty, in this paper I will present some of my reflections on how such landscape transitions preoccupy and engage the people living there.
The paper is based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out in relation to the research project, Remote Relocations: Work, Precarity and the Inclusion of Newcomers on Lolland, funded by the Independent Research Fund Denmark.
Trine Brinkmann’s research research focuses on migration, intergenerational memory, marginalization and processes of making home anew. During the past two years she has been a researcher in the collaborative ethnographic project, Remote Relocations. Work, Precarity and the Inclusion of Newcomers in Lolland, funded by the Independent Research Fund Denmark (DFF). Her role in the project is to explore the experiences of people, who move to Lolland from other Danish municipalities on social benefits. Carrying out this fieldwork has pointed her attention, both towards the ways in which a landscape undergoing continuous transition has inclusive qualities and how the current changes in demography and scenery fundamentally affect the kinds of collective memory at place.
Format: Online Zoom, on the permanent link of research seminars or contact ketevan_gurchiani@iliauni.edu.ge