Meeting the extremes and observing the mundane in-between: exploring social inequality in Bucharest, public lecture by Ger Duijzings (School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London)

Meeting the extremes and observing the mundane in-between: exploring social inequality in Bucharest

a public lecture by  

Ger Duijzings (School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London) 

Abstract: Ger Duijzings will be talking about his current research in Bucharest, where he is carrying out fieldwork on post-socialist urban transformations and rising social inequality. His fieldwork explores the extreme ends of the spectre, that is, the manifestations of extreme poverty and wealth, but it also brings into focus the urban sites where these extreme worlds meet, on the street and in traffic. He will present his work through a number of separate ethnographic vignettes (on the night, luxury shops, philantropy, security, mobility, traffic, garbage, and ghettos), which represent ongoing parallel, connected, and often collaborative research projects.

Ger Duijzings is Reader in the Anthropology of Eastern Europe at the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies (London). He has done research on the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, and is currently conducting research on social inequality in Bucharest. He published Religion and the Politics of Identity in Kosovo (2000) and History and Memory in Eastern Bosnia (2002, in Dutch), and he is co-editor of The New Bosnian Mosaic: Identities, Memories and Moral Claims in a Post-war Society (2007) and Cities Methodologies Bucharest (2011), and editor of Global Villages: Rural and Urban Transformations in Contemporary Bulgaria (2013). He collaborates with artists, resulting, among other things, in Lebensraum | Living Space (2009), a performance and video based on his diary while working in the former Yugoslavia in 1992 (with artist Rastko Novaković).