Politics of Waiting: Workfare, Post-Soviet Austerity, and the Ethics of Freedom

In this Research Seminar, Dr Liene Ozoliņa will discuss her new book Politics of Waiting: Workfare, post-Soviet austerity, and the ethics of freedom. Liene will be joined by Professor Lisa Baraitser.

Liene’s book, Politics of Waiting: Workfare, post-Soviet austerity, and the ethics of freedom,is an ethnographic study of the austerity state and politics of time. While the global political economy is usually imagined through metaphors of acceleration and speed, Liene will discuss waiting as a shadow temporality of contemporary logics of governance. The ethnographic site for the analysis - a state-run unemployment office in Latvia - grants unique access to observing everyday implementation of social assistance programmes that use acceleration and waiting as forms of control. This study reveals also how time shapes a nation’s identity as well as one’s sense of self and ordinary ethics in culturally specific ways. It traces how both the Soviet past, with its narratives of building communism at an accelerated speed while waiting patiently for a better future, as well as the post-Soviet nationalist narratives of waiting as a sacrifice for freedom come to play a role in this particular case of politics of waiting. The book has recently been published by Manchester University Press as part of their new Political Ethnography series.

Liene Ozoliņa is a Course Tutor in the Department of Sociology, LSE. 

Liene’s research interests include ethnographic study of the state, post-Soviet neoliberalism, and social theory.  

Lisa Baraitser is a Professor of Psychosocial Theory at Birkbeck College. 

Lisa's research focuses on gender and sexuality, motherhood and the maternal, and temporality, drawing on feminist theory, psychoanalysis, and philosophies of ethics, affect, and event.

View the Michaelmas Termline up for the Research Seminar Series here.