While there has already been an engaged critique of the 'transition to capitalism', less work has explored the limits of the dominant capitalocentric accounts of postsocialism. In this paper, we argue that capitalist development in postsocialist societies should be seen as one part of a diverse economy, constituted by a host of economic practices articulated with one another in dynamic and complex ways and in multiple sites and spaces. To make this argument, we develop three interlinked points. First, we suggest that many ofthe prevailing conceptualizations ofdiverse economic practices in postsocialism fail to address adequately the multiple geographies within which such practices are constituted, enabled and constrained. Second, we argue that in much of the literature only limited attention has been paid to the articulation ofcapitalist and non-capitalist economies and to the mutually constitutive sets of social relations that underpin the diverse economies ofpostsocialism. Lastly, we focus on the political and moral economy ofpostsocialism% diverse economies and ask how these practices should be valued. We conclude by arguing that central to any understanding of the diverse economies of postsocialism must be a recognition of the power relations which shape and are shaped by the articulations and geographies of economic practices. This recognition, we argue, enables the possibility of reassessing the place, politics and value of such practices.

This paper seeks to build on ongoing work in east central Europe and the former Soviet Union—in geography and beyond—to think through the conceptualisation of post‐socialism. The rationale for this is threefold. Firstly, we see a need to understand post‐socialist conditions as they are lived and experienced by those in the region. Secondly, we seek to challenge the persistent tendency to marginalise the experiences of the non‐western world in a discourse of globalisation and universalisation. Thirdly, we identify a need to ask how the conditions of post‐socialism reshape our theorising more widely. Centring our analysis on history, geography and difference, we review a wide range of perspectives on the socialist and post‐socialist, but argue for a strategic essentialism that recognises post‐socialist difference without eclipsing differences. In outlining how we might understand history, geography and difference in post‐socialism, we draw on key theorisations from post‐colonialism (such as the articulation of the post‐ with the pre‐, the relationship to the west, the rethinking of histories/categories, the end of the post) and outline post‐socialisms that are partial and not always explanatory but nevertheless important.

In reporting on recent research on the changing geographies of everyday life in the town of Nowa Huta in southern Poland, this paper seeks to promote the use of post-socialism as a conceptual, rather than simply descriptive and/or transitory, category. By exploring experiences of (im)mobility and (in)security in post-socialism, this paper connects to related work on the West and asks what difference post-socialism makes. It concludes by presenting a post-socialism marked out as different by the particular experiences of socialism, its construction and destruction and as a partial and hybrid social form, produced by a combination of multiple social forms constructed at varied scales of time and space. key words post-socialism Poland everyday geographies mobility

Because the economy is not found as an empirical object among other worldly things, in order for it to be ‘seen’ by the human perceptual apparatus it has to undergo a process, crucial for science, of representational mapping. This is doubling, but with a difference; the map shifts the point of view so that viewers can see the whole as if from the outside, in a way that allows them, from a specific position inside, to find their bearings. (Buck‐Morss 1995, 440)

In this paper, we examine the value of ethnographic research for developing a critical area studies approach that promotes cosmopolitan scholarship and contributes to the decentring of universal knowledge claims. We focus on the potential of ethnographic research on postsocialist change to form part of such a re-envisaged, critical area studies. The paper seeks to demonstrate to what extent ethnographic research not only offers a better understanding of the social and cultural practices through which postsocialist transformations are lived and negotiated, but also produces new conceptual insights on the basis of engaging with empirical complexity. Problems of researcher positionality, the politics of representation, methodology and ethics are discussed in relation to recent critiques of anthropological writing and research. We draw on Massey's (2005) concept of space-time and Robinson's (2003) and Gibson-Graham's (2004) proposals for a postcolonial, critical area studies to identify ways of reimagining ethnography as a mode of engagement rather than observation and of producing rather than surveying difference.