Project overview
This project engages with practices of “commoning” in a post-communist setting. Here, “commons” are understood to pertain not simply to collective rights of use and ownership of natural resources (pastures, water, forests), but to also concern infrastructures of knowledge production, social reproduction, and aesthetic practices carrying a “promising but unspecified sense of an alternative” (Linebaugh 2014: 142; cf. also: Goriunova 2021). Counter to conceptualisations of the commons which tend to “assume that emancipatory ideas of commons and commoning come from the West” (Vilenica, 2023: 12), the project “Post-Communist Grounds. In Search of the Commons” appraises the political and theoretical potential of commoning from the perspective of post-1989 societies – an often-neglected site of analysis or one that remains restricted to developmentalist frames that look at these sites through a neocolonial prism of “lagging behind” (cf. Buden 2009; Țichindeleanu 2011).
Thus, the project seeks to re-evaluate experiments with commoning and experiences of struggle against enclosures from the so-called ‘Eastern bloc’. This includes not only efforts of organising reproductive labour, public infrastructure or free time under state socialism, but also contemporary experiences of organising sociality differently and creating spaces of being in common – from daily marches in Minsk during the 2020-2021 uprisings in Belarus to efforts of reclaiming a feminised experience of labour emigration from present-day Georgia.
Thus, the project seeks to re-evaluate experiments with commoning and experiences of struggle against enclosures from the so-called ‘Eastern bloc’. This includes not only efforts of organising reproductive labour, public infrastructure or free time under state socialism, but also contemporary experiences of organising sociality differently and creating spaces of being in common – from daily marches in Minsk during the 2020-2021 uprisings in Belarus to efforts of reclaiming a feminised experience of labour emigration from present-day Georgia.
