In most literature in geography and agrarian studies, rural dispossession is neatly related to land rights or access, a trend that increased with debates about the recent wave of farmland investments worldwide. Drawing on long‐term fieldwork in rural Russia, this paper critiques that focus and the assumed nexus between rural dispossession and farmland, as is prevents an understanding of more dispersed stakes, modes and temporalities of dispossession. I introduce the concept of dispersed dispossession which advances our understanding of social and relational objects of dispossession beyond natural resources (such as sustaining institutions and infrastructures), and the tangled, complex, often slow and silent modes and temporalities of dispossession beyond spectacular events. I show how the concept sheds new light on current agrarian change in Russia, and how it contributes to debates on (rural) dispossession and “land grabs” more generally.

This article explores the nexus of slow violence as a concept, research focus, and problem on the one hand, and the practices and politics of ethnographic fieldwork and writing on the other. I argue that paying more explicit attention to methodological challenges in conducting ethnographies of slow violence is both necessary and worthwhile. Ethnographies can animate the broader debates on slow violence, infuse them with new concepts and political urgencies, and relate them to new sites and problems. Conversely, the problem of slow violence can advance ethnographic debates and practices, even beyond ethnographies of slow violence in a narrower sense. I highlight two aspects. First, I explore epistemological alliances between researchers and research participants which confront forms of violence that at first remain partly elusive to both sides. Second, I argue for multi-temporal ethnographies which work through drawn-out and complex timescapes of violence and loss by tracing cross-temporal connections. Notions of fieldwork are still mainly defined in spatial terms, and so the problem of slow violence is an important reminder to pay more attention to temporal dimensions. I build this argument on ethnographic research conducted in rural Russia, and thus also show how the concept of slow violence helps to make sense of and to make visible those forms of loss and dispossession that often remain elusive in academic and public representations of the Russian countryside.

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Abstract. In this “positioning” we discuss current developments, possibilities and challenges around working with film in and for geography. We describe possibilities that certain conscious and collaborative ways of employing film offer: They point beyond film analysis and are more than a mere add-on to communicate research results, but rather can stimulate new forms of reflexivity and creativity along different steps of research and teaching processes. We further show how the emergence of new digital and physical platforms can enable and support exchange on film and other digital media, using the example of our new media laboratory (mLab) at the University of Bern.

Drawing on ethnographic research, this study analyzes the work of a German political foundation in Ukraine. Departing from a governmentality perspective that closely examines concrete practices, I focus on the organization's attempts to establish itself as a political actor. This foundation aims to build more democratic political imaginations and open up different spaces for contestation. However, in both its rationalities and its practices, the foundation's project also (re)inscribes enclosures. It is both reflective and productive of boundaries between those who qualify as full political subjects, and others who do not, and claims a preformed knowledge of democracy and civil society. In examining situated and ambivalent claims to democracy and civil society—on the level of practices and beyond ‘classic’ liberal contexts of governance—this paper demonstrates that studies of governmentality provide analytical tools to shed light on subjects that have gained little attention in the field so far. It further contributes to a deeper understanding of what kinds of publics and political realities emerge in projects of ‘actually existing democratization’.