Moving post-socialist publics: citizens, spaces, and practices

Abstract

ABSTRACT This Introduction to the Special Issue on moving post-socialist publics aims to lay out how existing mobility politics and discourses in the region under scrutiny are intertwined with historical, socialist-era mobility practices, and infrastructures. Mobility paths and policies are imbued with a contested understanding of socialist legacies as well as capitalist realities. The Special Issue explores how transport options and choices confront citizens with social diversity, transformations of social norms, institutions and routines, values, concepts, and traditions. Valuable lessons can be learnt in terms of critical mobility geographies beyond the region as post-socialist transformations address justice and changing social norms and understandings of state roles. A decolonial inspiration that challenges existing readings of the formerly socialist region and transgresses the analytical “Othering” of its transition experience can be traced throughout the papers. Instead of arguing whether or not post-socialism is still a valid analytical framework, authors see the region as marked by multiple experiences of modernity and coloniality. In the former Soviet peripheries, urban mobility shapes socio-spatial contentions, making visible multiple and conflicting narratives of modernity and coloniality, tracing flows and dependencies at different scales, and taking into account complex constellations of actors, cultures, and materialities. The post-socialist lens is meant to critically scrutinize continuities and changes, providing particular interpretations for contemporary issues: mobile post-socialist publics are thus a turn away from what was before but in a context in which a strong relation to the past is embedded in several continuities in institutions, materialities, and practices.