Finnish Scholar to Discuss Global and Local Processes in Rural Areas
On Thursday, April 28, at 6 p.m., Dr. Laura Assmuth from the Dept. of Sociology at the University of Helsinki (Finland) will give a seminar at VMU (K. Donelaičio g. 52, room 309), titled Rural Lives Between Local and Global: Ethnographies of Transformation from Finland, Estonia, Russia and Ukraine. The event, organized by the VMU Centre for Social Anthropology, is part of a series of research seminars on social anthropology scheduled for the spring semester of 2011.
The seminar will analyse how global and local processes intertwine at rural and provincial areas. Themes of migration, seasonal jobs and changing local and ethnic identities will be explored, problematic questions of land use and tourism will be raised. Methodological approaches will become relevant in the discussions of how a group of anthropologists treat and apply global phenomena in the research of local contexts. The seminar will rely on the examples of ethnographic research in Southern Italy, Baltic countries, Russia and Eastern and Northern Finland.
Dr. Laura Assmuth’s research interests are: political anthropology; rural studies; study of post-socialism; gender; life course; ethnic, national, religious and linguistic identities; state borders; and migration.