Vera Smirnova
Urban political geography | Land and property regimes | Territory and territorialization | Russia

I am a human geographer with research interests at the intersection of political geography, history of geographic thought, urban and territorial politics. My work explores the relations between land and power and their various manifestations in post-socialist and authoritarian contexts. In particular, I am interested in understanding how rights to land ownership and other modes of the appropriation of space are enacted, negotiated, and performed through formal and informal technologies of power.

 

This topic taps into two wider debates around spatial configurations of modern politics - on private property and on territory at large, emphasizing how practices of bordering (material and imaginary) lead to multiple forms of dispossession on different scales, from household to the nation. Recently, I have examined private property regimes by looking at multiple practices of land ownership in Russia that often draw on both, post-Soviet 'unrule' of law and a long history of collectivist land management. While my current work on the evolution of the conception of territory involved the study of the history of Russian geographic thought and its political interventions. My general commitment to studying struggles over land is indebted to a rich tradition of Russian spatial sciences that is often left unnoticed in recent debates on space and power that commonly draw from predominantly Eurocentric experiences.

 

I am originally from a Soviet mono-industrial town in the Russian North. Since completing my Ph.D. at the School of Public and International Affairs at Virginia Tech, I was a Postdoctoral research fellow at the National Research University Higher School of Economics in Moscow. I was a recipient of the Fulbright Fellowship, the Erasmus Plus Mobility Scholarship, the IJURR Dissertation Writing-up Grant, and the Antipode Foundation Institute for the Geographies of Justice award. While recently I have joined Kansas State University as an assistant professor in Geography and Political Science.