Dora Olivia Vicol (2018)
Hope, help, duty, and disappointment: Romanian mobility and its discontents
Olivia built her doctoral research on an ethnography of a Romanian migrant network. Using the concept of economy of favours, her thesis showed how the instrumentalisation of personal connections, traditionally seen as a product of dysfunctional socialist economies, was also an essential tactic of getting by in a neoliberal regime where good work and housing are in short supply, and where a little help from friends becomes an everyday mode of navigating precarity. Olivia's doctoral work prompted her to found the Work Rights Centre, a charity that provides free specialist advice and uses evidence based research to advocate for policies that support migrants' social mobility. As the charity's director, she leads on strategy and policy development.
Mayanka Mukherji (2020)
Storeys of Emptiness
Based on 12 months of ethnographic research in a luxury square and a council estate in Chelsea, London, this thesis questions widespread conceptualisations of empty homes as sites of decay and decline associated with a loss of community. It combines current debates about the transformation of homes into financial assets with the latest material culture approaches to land, belonging and the home, to offer unique insights into everyday experiences of living alongside empty homes. Through rituals and practices such as gardening, visiting the nearby cemetery, drawing family trees and carol singing, the participants in my research created strong feelings of belonging and identity amidst flows of capital and the financialisation of housing. By focusing on specific creative practices that residents engage in to battle or conceal emptiness across the two sites, the thesis extends beyond the policy-oriented approach of “solving” the problem of emptiness, while allowing for a critical interrogation of which homes fall within this problematisation in the first place. Mayanka argues that the perceived emptiness is less about absence and more about neglect towards particular forms of care. By paying close attention to practices of care and the trope of the community that is evoked across both my sites, my research transcends any simplistic binary narrative of emptiness as absence or crisis and reveals instead how the concept is linked with deeply ingrained patterns of ownership, cycles of renewal and long-lasting relationships to land.
Mayanka is a Social Anthropology Fellow at the London School of Economics. She teaches seminars on Economic Anthropology, Anthropology of Revolution, Kinship and Fieldwork Methods.
Claudia Hartman (2021)
Translocal Intimacy. Understanding Contestations of Migrant Care Work in Adult Social Care in South East England
The underfunded English adult social care sector struggles to recruit staff for low-waged direct care roles. Employers welcome migrant workers for these roles as they tolerate challenging working conditions. Still, employers fear that the ‘tap’ will soon be turned off as public attitudes disfavour low-skilled labour migration. Grounded in twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork in South East England, this study examines migrant care workers’ everyday challenges across the scales of bodies, homes, physical distance, and national communities. It shows that the perceived ease with which the ‘tap’ of migrant care work flows is enabled by the hard-fought resilience of migrant care workers, adult social care service users, and their relatives, and grounded in socio-economic inequalities between people and between localities.
Emma Rimpiläinen (2022)
Mobility that Emplaces: Governance of Presence in the Aftermath of the Donbas War
This thesis examines displacement in the context of the war in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine that began in 2014. It argues that displacement has affected both those who left Donbas as well as those who stayed. While conventional definitions of displacement posit movement as part of the problem of displacement, the thesis argues that for current and former residents of Donbas mobility is often a means for overcoming it. The thesis is organised around experiences of the “mobile displaced,” that is, people who left from Donbas after 2014 but whose attempts at emplacement elsewhere were frustrated. It draws on ethnographic fieldwork in multiple sites in Ukraine and Russia carried out over the course of a year, as well as a rich selection of historiographical materials, books, and films.
Emma is currently working with the Finnish Refugee Council advising displaced people from Ukraine in Helsinki and briefing government agencies and NGO actors about the societal and political context in Ukraine. In the fall of 2022, she will join the Institute for Russian and Eurasian Studies (IRES) at Uppsala University, Sweden, as a postdoctoral researcher to work on her book manuscript provisionally titled "Displacement, Loss of Place, and Mobility that Emplaces: War-Induced Migration from Ukraine’s Donbas Region since 2014.
Maayan Roichman (2022)
Putting Your Heart On the Screen: An Ethnography of Young Filmmakers in Israel
Putting Your Heart on the Screen explores a new generation of Israeli filmmakers whose approach to filmmaking is defined by their conviction that they both must and can only make films about their own painful experiences—what they call their ‘heart’ (lev). It introduces a new approach to the complex subjective processes at play within film production via its focus on the intersections between this new genre of personal films and the subjectivities and lived experiences of the filmmakers who make them. The thesis argues that the widespread desire among the young filmmakers to make ‘personal films’ emerged from a regime of truth that has become dominant at the expense of other forms of truth telling—a regime in which the truth that the creative subject seeks to uncover and represent is her own ‘wounded heart.’ ‘The heart’ is analysed as a historically particular form of truth that lies at the centre of a complex discursive apparatus consisting of ethical practices, affective orientations, aesthetic forms, spatial components, and economic relations, all of which come to inform the creative practice of filmmaking.
Maayan Roichman is an Azrieli International Postdoctoral Fellow, both at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, and the Department of Industrial Engineering, Tel-Aviv University. She is also a Postdoctoral Affiliate at the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography.
Marija Norkunaite (2023) (co-supervised with Nicolette Makovicky)
(Re-)Claiming the Social Contract: State-Society Relations in Three Former Socialist Towns in the Baltics
This thesis studies Russian-speaking communities and their relationship and lived experiences with the state in Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. It examines how members of Russian-speaking minorities in former socialist towns redefine the membership criteria and the political community of which they strive to become a part, as well as the ways and forms of governance that the Russian-speaking residents believe would allow them to achieve their ideal state-society relationship. Marija argues that when deprived of recognition to various degrees, the Russian-speaking (non-)citizens claim full and deserving membership in the national collective in terms of the social contract and especially through their economic and fiscal contributions. The thesis draws on ten months of ethnographic fieldwork in multiple sites in the Baltics and contributes to the emerging anthropology of the social contract and to broader debates on citizenship, deservingness, and political subjectivities in national, neoliberal, and postsocialist contexts.
Marija is currently a Research Fellow at Vilnius University Institute of International Relations and Political Science and a Postdoctoral Affiliate at the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography at the University of Oxford. She is also a convenor of the EASA Anthropology of Tax Network.
