The floating churches of Volgograd: River topologies and warped spatialities of faith

Abstract

This paper explores creative reuse as an alternative modality to upcycle the materiality and documentary capacities of things, beyond the linear entrapments of historical or functional redundancy. Drawing on an amphibious ethnography of Volgograd's riverscapes, we analyse the floating churches inaugurated after the collapse of the Soviet Union to support the revival of faith practices. Acting as mobile centres of religious activity, they morph various temporalities, functions and places into multidimensional operative domains that range from the embodied practices of sailing and engaging in religious rituals to the making of sacred space at a regional level. We conclude by suggesting that their operations and impact rely on topologies of fixed points and shifting spatialities, which provide a salient vehicle for broader geographical interrogations of memory, creativity and mobility.

Material Pacification: How a Conflict Over Paving Uganda’s Tourism Road Got Accidentally Resolved

“…Following this literature, this article analyses the Ruhija road in Uganda as an object that is enacted in multiple practices (Mol, 2002). In addition, we also draw from discussions on material agency that have emerged in the last 15 years in various disciplines like archaeology (Joyce, 2012;Meskell, 2008), sociology (Pinch & Swedberg, 2008), political science (Bennett et al, 2010;Coole & Frost, 2010), organisation studies (Carlile et al, 2013), and extensively in studies on landscapes, spaces and places (Anderson & Wylie, 2009;Barba Lata & Minca, 2018;Bennett, 2010;Duineveld et al, 2017) and tourism studies. In the latter, it has been argued that materiality such as cheese (Ren, 2011), cigars (Simoni, 2012), coral reefs (Middelveld et al, 2016) are central to the enactment of tourist destinations.…”

Batwa, gorillas and the Ruhija road: a relational perspective on controversies at Bwindi Impenetrable National Park, Uganda

“…In this paper we diverge from these approaches by analysing the road as an object that is enacted in multiple practices (Mol, 2002). To do so, we draw from discussions on material agency that have emerged in the last 15 years in various disciplines like archaeology (Meskell, 2008;Joyce, 2012), sociology (Pinch and Swedberg, 2008), political science (Coole and Frost, 2010;Bennett et al, 2010), organisation studies (Carlile et al, 2013), and extensively in studies on landscapes, spaces and places (Anderson and Wylie, 2009;Bennett, 2010;Barba Lata and Minca, 2018;Duineveld et al, 2017) and tourism studies.…”