Béatrice von Hirschhausen
Research Director at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) - UMR 8504 Géographie-cités, Paris and at the Centre Marc Bloch in Berlin
What is your project and why did you choose it?
I am a geographer interested in how "spaces" and "places" affect social transformations, namely the way that they shape historic and social events and processes. In the context of the LimSpaces project, I focus on the everyday strategies of rural actors in Moldova who typically have strong connections to their agricultural village, the main city of Chișinău, family abroad and, in certain cases, Romania and Russia. Along with Sandra Parvu, we want to look at how these multi-situated rural families develop strategies in the short, medium, and long term between these geographical spaces.
What brought your interest to the region?
My interest stems all the way back to my doctoral thesis on Romania (Universität Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne, Geography) during which I conducted fieldwork following the 1989 Romanian Revolution and learned Romanian. I was always interested in studying Moldova, a neighboring country with a Romanian-speaking population and yet, a completely different history as a country which was under the Soviet Union. So, when we began discussing this project, I saw an opportunity to finally go and work on Moldova in relation to a subject which has fascinated me for a long time - the strategies and future projections of ordinary actors, caught in a geographical in-between (Zwischenraum, entre-deux, liminal) space.
How has Russia's war against Ukraine affected your project?
The war was a terrible shock for everyone. But unfortunately, it shows the relevance of our project and the immediate need to produce knowledge about these regions under existential threat. At the same time, many of our projects have become unfeasible and we have had to redefine and recover the coherence of LimSpaces. One of the main questions for me, as one of the people working on Moldova, is now the pertinence of this comparison, considering that the conditions of the two countries have become incomparable. We will most likely have to reorient our study on Moldova to interrogate not only the experience of the in-between, but also what it means to be in such close proximity to a conflict that could threaten the very existence of one's country and region.
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