East of when, post where? 'Eastern Europeanness' and travelling racial imaginaries

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• Špela Drnovšek Zorko, Catholic University Eichstätt-Ingolstadt
• Wednesday 07 June 2023, 17:30-19:00
• The Classroom, Department of Architecture (1st floor yellow stairs) or livestreamed at tinyurl.com/speladz.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact dk566.

Last talk of term

We cordially invite you to attend this year’s keynote lecture for the seminar series Thinking from the East: Postsocialist Geographies and the Geopolitics of Knowledge. We are pleased to welcome Dr. Špela Drnovšek Zorko, an anthropologist of race, migration, and memory whose work spans Central and Eastern Europe, contemporary Britain, and the Yugoslav region. Špela’s talk will be an excellent conclusion to a fruitful term filled with conversations about race and raciality in Eastern Europe, migration and exclusion, and the various registers from which we speak as scholars of the region. Her publications on the articulations of race and genealogies of encounter among former Yugoslav migrants in Britain and her recent elaboration of a research methodology of ‘postness’ may be of particular interest. This talk will take place on Wednesday, January 7th at 5:30pm in the Classroom, Department of Architecture, University of Cambridge (see below for directions) and will be simultaneously streamed via Zoom at the link http://www.tinyurl.com/speladz. All are welcome to attend.

Amidst a flourishing literature on race and the ‘Eastern European’ region, including work on the racialisation of East-West migration, historical (re-)assessments of racial subjectivities, and decolonial approaches to the geopolitics of whiteness, I take a small but necessary step sideways to think about postcolonial Britain as the condition for claim-making by ‘Eastern European migrants’. I do so in relation to the figure of the post-war migrant – and the politics of presence evoked in the phrase “we are here because you were there” – to tease out how postcolonial migration shapes the possibilities for migrants from Eastern Europe to be thought of as historical subjects in Britain as a (b)ordered society, as well as the multiple routes through which the ‘postness’ of their presence intervenes in broader discussions about racialisation.

Špela Drnovšek Zorko is a JSPS Postdoctoral Fellow at Waseda University, Tokyo, where she is investigating current intersections between borders, racialisation, and new formulations of East-West relations. Her interdisciplinary research explores the politics of race, migration, and memory through the lens of diasporic postsocialism and global encounters with ‘postness’, with a specific emphasis on Central and Eastern Europe, contemporary Britain, and the Yugoslav region. She obtained her Marie Curie-funded PhD in Anthropology at SOAS , University of London (2012-2017) and was previously a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Warwick Department of Sociology (2017-2020). Špela is affiliated with the Dialoguing Posts and NODE UK -Japan networks and is a convenor of the British Sociological Association Diaspora, Migration and Transnationalism study group. In the past she worked as a translator, with a particular predilection for translating Slovenian poets into English.

Directions: The Department of Architecture is located at Scroope Terrace, and someone will be on hand to welcome and guide attendees until the talk begins. The Classroom is located on the first floor, via the yellow staircase.

This talk is part of the seminar series Thinking from the East (?): Postsocialist geographies and thegeopolitics of knowledge. These seminars are our attempt to challenge a pervasive absence in this university: that of the “postsocialist,” “Eastern European,” “Central Asian,” “Balkan,” “postsoviet,” (etc.) subject. At the epistemic margins of the European project, we see something more than our own peripherality: we see colonial logics at work, ones that seeks to suppress not only certain kinds ofknowledge, but also certain kinds of people. This seminar series will engage with the very exciting emerging literature that highlights the colonial logics that sustain a certain kind of Eastern European subject, while erasing (or worse) others (particularly Muslim and Roma Europeans); writing that speaks against ‘colorblindness’ and assimilation in the region; and scholarship that builds bridges and solidarity with other knowledges that are marginalized in the academy. In doing so, we hope to build a network ofresearchers in and around Cambridge working to challenge epistemic erasure and imagine other worlds. The series will continue in Michaelmas 2023.

This talk is part of the Thinking from the East? Geographies of Postsocialism and the Geopolitics of Knowledge series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• The Classroom, Department of Architecture (1st floor yellow stairs) or livestreamed at tinyurl.com/speladz
• Thinking from the East? Geographies of Postsocialism and the Geopolitics of Knowledge

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