Everyday Belonging in Post-Soviet Borderlands:

The Case of Russian Speakers in Estonia and Kazakhstan

Focusing on the lives of Russian speakers, their visions of space and community in post-Soviet Estonia and Kazakhstan, this talk provides insights into the complex meanings of everyday belonging among linguo-cultural minorities. How do minorities define own surroundings? How do they respond to possible political and socio-cultural exclusions? How do they reconcile between claims of being excluded and attempts to call places like Estonia or Kazakhstan their home? To unpack these questions productively in this talk I draw not only on the broader political discourses but concentrate especially on the micro-level practices of Russian speakers in two borderland cities – Narva in Estonia and Petropavlovsk in Kazakhstan. Surveying these intersecting layers, I wish to reconstruct the life in the borderlands as that of ‘exterior interiority’ – a continuous spiral play of boundary construction, appropriation, and transgression between different versions of Estonianness/Kazakhness, Europeanness/Cosmopolitanness and Russianness.

Der Gastvortrag findet als virtuelle Veranstaltung via Zoom statt. Details zur Teilnahme finden Sie unter dem externen Link auf der Seite der DGO-Zweigstelle Bamberg an der Universität Bamberg. 

Veranstaltungsprogramm

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