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Institute of Geography
University of Bern
Hallerstrasse 12
CH-3012 Bern
| Sensing urban manufacturing: from conspicuous to sensible production This paper explores the multisensory dimension of urban manufacturing to interrogate the spatial possibilities for production in a small town in Switzerland. Together with a group of graduate students, we apply sensory methods to explore how production shapes urban sensescapes and how these sensescapes affect our relation to production. Our study sparks critical questions about mixed-use zoning and tentatively advances the concept of sensible production: a production that not only is perceptible and can actively be engaged with, but that also shows good sense, makes sense, and focuses on what we need. |
| The end of postsocialism (as we knew it): Diverse economies and the East This paper brings together two streams of literature which rarely enter into conversation: diverse economies scholarship and critical readings of postsocialism. Mobilising the cases of food self-provisioning (FSP) in Czechia and agricultural cooperatives in Kyrgyzstan as an empirical basis for our reflections, we pursue a two-fold aim. Firstly, we call for attention to the postsocialist East as fertile ground for the study of diverse economies. Secondly, we offer a postcapitalist reading of postsocialism as embedded and emancipated theorising, arguing that diverse economies thinking can support novel representations of this geopolitical area and open space to appreciate economic diversity on the ground. |
| The "failure" of cooperatives in Kyrgyzstan: A postcapitalist critique of a biased narrative This paper questions a widespread narrative that presents cooperative initiatives as mainly unsuccessful in postsocialist contexts. Taking the example of cooperative promotion in Kyrgyzstan after its independence from the Soviet Union, it highlights how this narrative is part of a broader hegemonic discourse on development and on the economy. The paper advances an alternative, postcapitalist, reading of cooperatives and cooperation in Kyrgyzstan and postsocialist contexts more in general. |
| From failure to emancipation: the case for a feminist research practice In this paper, I reflect on multiple “failures” I encountered during my fieldwork on agricultural cooperatives in Kyrgyzstan: from my own “failure” to comply with a linear research design to the alleged “failure” of farmers to cooperate within the formal boundaries of cooperatives. I then suggest how a feminist research practices based on a performative ontology enables a reframing of these experiences that opens space for more hopeful affects. |
| Rethinking agricultural cooperatives in Kyrgyzstan. Towards a postcapitalist approach to cooperation in postsocialism My doctoral thesis investigates cooperation practices within and beyond agricultural cooperatives. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in a village in Kyrgyzstan, it unravels local and international discourses of nostalgia, contempt and pride linked to cooperation practices in socialist and postsocialist times, and reflect on the subjectivities entangled with these discourses. It thereby proposes a postcapitalist reading of postsocialism as a concept and space. |
