Everyday Belonging in the Post-Soviet Borderlands: Russian Speakers in Estonia and Kazakhstan - Hardcover

by Alina Jasina-Schäfer (Author)

Everyday Belonging in the Post-Soviet Borderlands examines the Russophone communities in peripheral cities adjacent to the Russian borders in Estonia and Kazakhstan. The research adopts a cross-disciplinary, space-sensitive approach that focuses comparatively on individual memories, narratives, and performances. Based on ethnographic examples, this book reconstructs belonging as a complex dialectical relationship between "inclusion" and "exclusion." This relationship, it is argued, manifests itself through a continuous spiral of boundary construction, appropriation, and transgression among different versions of Estonianness and Kazakhness, Europeanness and Cosmopolitanness, as well as Russianness.

Author Biography

Alina Jasina-Schäferis post-doctoral fellow at the Federal Institute for Culture and History of the Germans in Eastern Europe (BKGE).