Emptiness

Abstract

In Latvian towns and villages, post‐Soviet capitalism has produced a palpable change that locals describe as “emptiness.” People point to empty houses and apartments, and they list friends and relatives who have left. They fear school closures and the cancellation of transportation routes. They imagine the future as an entirely different world, one in which they will play no part. As a social formation, emptiness consists of (1) an observable reality wherein places rapidly lose their constitutive elements (people, infrastructure, services, social networks, and the future); (2) a way of life that emerges in response to such changes, which seem irreversible; and (3) an emic interpretive framework for making sense of the new reality. Emptiness in Latvia is symptomatic of post–Cold War spatiotemporal arrangements of power wherein capital and the state increasingly abandon people and places. [emptiness, capitalism, the future, postsocialism, Latvia, eastern Europe]

Industrial Revolution 4.0 and Its Impact on the Preparation of the Workforce by Universities in Indonesia

“…Something similar was experienced by Europe in the 19th century, which produced enough population to occupy almost three times as much land as its own in America and Oceania. Later, the Crisis of 1929 transformed the American farm, and the surplus population was welcomed by the plans promoted by the New Deal, and finally, World War II served as a Malthusian solution to population pressure (Dzenovska, 2020).…”

Writing failure: knowledge production, temporalities, ethics, and traces

“…We aim to hold the various modes of addressing failure, outlined above, in tension, following the contours of different forms of failure as they open out or preclude certain interventions and responses, are rejected or redefined (Zoanni 2018). This approach resonates with Dace Dzenovska's (2020) take on emptiness in the Latvian countryside, which has a sensual dimension, multiple explanatory narratives, and is the site of reconstituting ways of life and ideas about the future.…”

The impact of rural emptiness on gender relations in postsocialist Albania

“…An emerging body of work led by Dzenovska (2011Dzenovska ( , 2018Dzenovska ( , 2020 reinterprets the postsocialist condition in remote rural areas that have seen dramatic levels of depopulation and disinvestment (Czibere et al, 2021;Máliková, 2013). Eschewing the future-oriented 'transition' terminology, these scholars observe a sense of entrapment in a seemingly never-ending present characterised by decay and decline.…”

“…This article is structured in five parts. The next section sets out our conceptual approach to understanding the gendered impacts of rural emptiness in Puka, using the concepts of patriarchy (Walby, 1990), gender contract (Duncan, 1995) and emptiness (Dzenovska, 2020). We focus on informal care (Carbó & Garcia‐Orellán, 2020) as a dimension of local gender contracts (Forsberg, 2010) that highlights the unequal distribution of the additional burdens conditions of rural emptiness place on families between women and men.…”