Home, Boundaries, and Translocal Connectedness in Russia's Exclave of Kaliningrad

• Applicant: Dr. Rita Sanders
• Subject Area: Social and Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology
• Term: from 2015 to 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 288042644

This project provides the first ethnography on the link between state borders and various boundaries and how both are connected to migration and people's feelings of home and belonging in Kaliningrad. The Kaliningrad region signifies a German past as Königsberg and a complicated situation as a Russian enclave within the EU for the present time. The region became part of the Soviet Union only in 1945, which implies that everybody's in-migration is known either personally or as part of one's family history. Moreover, since the break-up of the Soviet Union Kaliningrad became a 'crossroad city' where people from Central Asia and the Caucasus stay for a while often in order to migrate further to the 'West', while others come back from the 'West', where they had migrated to from different parts of the previous Soviet Union years ago. The aim of the project is to examine how different types of migrants find a home in Kaliningrad and establish orders in terms of institutions, organizations but also daily routines and identities. For this purpose, I will apply a border studies approach and analyze establishing orders and finding a home through the lens of boundary drawing and border experiences. In this endeavor, I conceptualize boundaries as lines running through state borders, which, furthermore, implies considering the translocal connections and identities of individual people and organizations. This project, thus, takes a fresh view on the concepts of home, translocality and border by combining them in a new manner. The project will be carried out as ethnographic field research in order to best master the complexities of people's live trajectories, situations, actions, and perceptions. Through daily interaction with people over an extended period of time, I will obtain cultural intimacy and, thus, insights into people's daily routines and processes of situated boundary drawing. The additional application of a range of methods from the social sciences yields comprehensive information and allows for triangulating the data. In particular, I will use live story interviewing, cognitive tests and the recording of genealogies and personal social networks. The results of my project will be relevant for other research on migration and border, which is mostly focused on regions in the 'West' and the Global South. Furthermore, Kaliningrad as a 'gateway' to the EU has thus far not been investigated from an anthropological point of view. Therefore, this study will also be relevant to practitioners in the field of migration in Russia and beyond. Finally, the recent conflict in Ukraine has demonstrated how important people's relations to borders and feelings of belonging at the edges of the previous Soviet Union might become. To this end, the project seeks to enhance the knowledge on different perceptions and practices of home and boundary drawing in a zone of transition between 'East' and 'West'.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Russia
• Co-Investigator: Professor Dr. Ilya Dementiev