Search

The study is focused on resistance to urban public transportation crisis in Eastern and South-eastern European cities in the context of post-socialist transition and Europeanization. The object of the study is interesting from several perspectives. First, the region is historically less motorized than Western Europe or North America, and using public transport remains a common feature of everyday life here. Second, crisis in public transportation is one of the most visible and large among many decrepitated infrastructures that involve interaction of many different stake-holders. ‘Crisis’ in the work is not understood only as a mere constellation of qualitative indicators of decrease, slow-down, or malfunction but also as a negotiated state of art that different parties try to declare, manage, or combat pursuing their interests. The work is based on ethnography of living with and resistance to the crisis of urban public transport in Eastern Ukraine and South-Eastern Romania. Collected in seven cities between 2011 and 2016, ethnographic data and media materials serve for analysis of how transportation crisis affected urban life in the region since the 1990s and in which ways different social groups reacted on it. Introduction and five chapters describe the infrastructural breakdown of municipal public transport and proliferation of shared taxi services, contradictory social policies aimed at support of vulnerable social groups, the development of activist epistemology aimed at the preservation of tram and trolleybus infrastructures, concluding with analysis of how discourse and practice of Europeanization modifies meanings of tram and trolleybus infrastructures for local populations. The methodology used includes ethnographic methods such as participant observation of public transportation use and maintenance, a semi-structured survey, in-depth interviews with elderly passengers, expert interviews with activists and transporticians, as well as elements of participant research in action. Additionally, the author analyzed newspapers and Internet materials. The work has three key aims. First, basing on ethnography of social responses to decay of public transit infrastructure, it seeks to analyze changing role of vehicles in industrialized post-socialist cities at the peripheries of Europe. Second, it aims to connect wider discussions on infrastructural crises, on one hand, and Europeanization, on the other, elaborating on the role of infrastructures and their parts in the construction of (European) identities. Third, it seeks to offer methodological insights into the ethnographical and collaborative study of degrading urban infrastructures. I expect these contributions to be of wider interest to anthropological, sociological, activist and policy-making audiences within and beyond mobility studies and South-East European area studies. This study is particularly innovative for several reasons. First, as an object of anthropological study, public transport – its social meanings and effects – is understudied though ubiquitous in post-socialist cities. Second, apart from giving an ethnographic description of resistance to infrastructural crisis in Romanian and Ukrainian cities, the study resonates with literature on post-socialist transition and Europeanization (works of Sarah Green, Carba Brkovic, Stef Jansen and others), viewing Europe as constantly under construction rather than completed and stabilized. Also, it is among few studies discussing ambiguous effect of crisis on mobilization of local actors and knowledge production. Finally, it proposes a new perspective on linkages between infrastructures and identities – wherein infrastructure can either draw focus away from identitarian agenda onto material basis or, alternatively, be involved into formation of European citizenship imaginary and self as well as of non-European Other. The study thus bridges studies of infrastructures, crises, and Europeanization – tracing how infrastructures and identities are (re-)constructured together., Im Fokus der Studie steht die Krise des öffentlichen Nahverkehrs in ost- und südosteuropäischen Städten im Kontext postsozialistischer Transformations- und Europäisierungsprozesse. Die Arbeit basiert auf der Ethnographie des Zusammenlebens und des Widerstands gegen des Verfalls des ÖPNV in der Ostukraine und Südostrumänien. Die in sieben Städten zwischen 2011 und 2016 gesammelte ethnografische Daten und Medienmaterialien dienen dazu, zu analysieren, wie sich die Verkehrskrise seit den 1990er Jahren auf das urbane Leben in der Region ausgewirkt hat und wie unterschiedliche gesellschaftliche Gruppen darauf reagiert haben. Im Umgang mit wenig erforschten Objekten schlägt das Projekt eine neue Perspektive auf Verbindungen zwischen Infrastrukturen und Identitäten vor – wobei Infrastruktur entweder den Fokus von der identitären Agenda auf die materielle Basis lenkt oder, in Gegenteil, in die Bildung einer Vorstellung von eigenen Europäischsein sowie von nicht-Europäische Andere.

Using material from Eastern Ukraine and Belarus, the text discusses the overlooked meanings of language codes switching and deviations from literary standards in the oral speech of residents of bilingual and border regions. This includes phonetic, grammatical and lexical pecularities, hearable in interviews and other recorded conversations. Orthography and, in particular, alphabet are understood in the text as a means of streamlining, manifestation of power and designation of territories’ sovereignty. It is proposed to hear the studied deviations and switches not only as diglossia and inability to master the norm, but also as a resource for transmitting additional meanings at the microcommunicative level. In an interview situation, these meanings indicate dynamics of relationship between the informant, the researcher, and the spoken. In particular, they can mark banal knowledge or information “for insiders”, as well as relations between the speaker and the place that are not transmitted by the alphabet and official communication. In non-linguistic interview transcripts deviations from the official standard and switching between two language norms are usually ignored. At the same time, the Internet as an unregulated orthography space gives us examples in which the mixture of languages is adopted, fixed in writing and used to expand the intonation repertoire of the text. Such examples include not only comments on forums and social networks, but also intentional transitions of spelling and lexical borders in bilingual publications and artistic texts. The author consider these techniques as a toolkit for the more adequate reflection of the multiplicity of spatial references in the words that we hear.