The project “Tbilisi as an Urban Assemblage” (funded by the Rustaveli Science Foundation) and the Doctoral Program in Anthropology on January 28, 2022, at 17:00, invite you to another research seminar. Sascha Roth, an associate researcher at the Max Planck Institute, presents his research:
Politics of Representation: Housing, Family, and State in Baku
In this talk, Sahscha Roth presents an outline of my recent monograph that takes the hardly considered phenomenon of housing as a starting point to approach present and past dynamics of state-citizen relations in Azerbaijan’s capital Baku. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and archival research he demonstrates how, beyond its economic aspects, social, political and moral notions of “house” and “home” have been shaping people’s everyday lives and families’ housing trajectories during and after socialism. With the privatisation of state-owned housing and the adoption of market economy in the 1990s, relationships between states and citizens in former socialist countries have undergone major social, economic, and political transformations. This raises questions on how various aspects of the Soviet-era housing regime and people’s experiences and memories of past everyday lives merge with present developments, challenges, and contexts. Furthermore, housing reflects crucial shifts in officially propagated state visions of modernisation more generally. Urban Architecture, materiality, and infrastructure has served socialist and postsocialist Azerbaijan to convey ideological visions of the future by “politics of representation”. By focusing on housing-related processes, at the level of the state as well as in local neighbourhoods, he argues that such representation should be understood as “façade politics” involving different modes of social interaction among citizens, state representatives, and institutions. Altogether, he maintains that “politics of representation” serve a timely understanding of contemporary processes in post-Soviet contexts and beyond.
Sascha Roth is a social anthropologist and received his Ph.D. from the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg in 2016 as a member of the International Max Planck Research School on the Anthropology, Archaeology and History of Eurasia. From 2016 until 2021 he was the Graduate School Coordinator at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology where he is an associate. His fields of academic interest are (post)socialism, urban anthropology, housing and architecture, ideologies and utopias, bureaucracy and the state, informality, (new) kinship, and infrastructure.
For more information, please contact:ketevan_gurchiani@iliauni.edu.ge