Image by Ricardo Hernandez.

This series argues that emptiness is emerging as a concrete spatial-temporal coordinate in the global landscape of capitalism and state power, and a heuristic device of political struggles. Contributions that range from examining political futures in Scotland to crooked cats in India and from empty apartments in London to abandoned retirement homes in Bosnia converge on emptiness as an analytic that cautions against giving form to futures without recognizing the violence that precedes them. The analytic of emptiness invites dwelling in the in-between space where endings and beginnings, destructions and creations, have not yet been sorted and arranged. This space is not empty, but rather full of humans, nature, things, relations, anticipations, and speculations.

Posts in This Series

Emptiness: An Introduction

Emptiness: An Introduction

Emptiness conjures up a variety of meanings for the modern subject, such as chaos before order or an existential void that accompanies the life of plenty. It is... More

Emptiness and Order

Emptiness and Order

On April 27, 2019, I attended a talka—a day of communal labor—in Mazciems, a village by the Latvian-Russian border that was built in the late-nineteenth century... More

Emptiness and Surface

Emptiness and Surface

Recent theoretical engagements with ruins in anthropology have examined questions of whether an abandoned or empty structure is a ruin to be venerated as the ph... More

Populated Emptiness

Populated Emptiness

Dom penzionera is a never completed socialist retirement home located in the northwestern Bosnian city of Bihać. Its construction was planned in the 1970s accor... More

Emptiness and Moral Order

Emptiness and Moral Order

My first introduction to empty homes was through the medium of light or, rather, its absence. Many newspaper articles that problematized the emptiness of centra... More

Emptiness, Vacancy, and Waste

Emptiness, Vacancy, and Waste

The empirical cases of urban and rural “emptying” from Hungary in this paper demonstrate a patterning of the waste-vacancy-emptiness nexus that reveals an impli... More

Emptiness and Refugee Camps

Emptiness and Refugee Camps

The so-called “Jungle” in Calais, which existed between 2015 and 2016, was constructed on a former city dump, located next to a large highway, beyond an industr... More

Emptiness and Deadly Environments

Emptiness and Deadly Environments

Emptiness is a consequence of war. War violently reconfigures relations between people and place. Homes get destroyed and looted. Neighborhoods are torn apart. ... More

Emptiness and Beastly Encounters

Emptiness and Beastly Encounters

A growing feature of the Himalayan state of Uttarakhand in India is the emptying out of humans from villages, which are then deemed nirjan (without people). Pop... More

Emptiness and COVID-19 Cartography

Emptiness and COVID-19 Cartography

Let us take a look at the now-famous satellite images produced by NASA and the European Space Agency comparing China’s atmospheric pollution between January 1 a... More

Emptiness and Futures

Emptiness and Futures

Following a chaotic Brexit referendum and its subsequent political fallout, the Scottish National Party (SNP) has seized the opportunity to rally toward a new r... More

Emptiness and Chronic Crisis

Emptiness and Chronic Crisis

After the destructive rupture of financial ruin and a decade of aggressive structural reform, Greece has entered a timespace of perpetual crisis marked by suspe... More