Abigail Karas
“It’s more like a village here”: Rural identities in contemporary Chișinău and the limits of urban transformation
5 November 2025, 13.00-14.00, Buchanan 215
Dr. Abigail Karas is an anthropologist and historian of the built environment, with a particular focus on (post-)Soviet cityscapes. Her work moves seamlessly across disciplines, drawing on anthropology, urban history, heritage, and cultural studies to explore how space and identity interact in the shifting landscapes of the post-socialist world.
Her current research investigates how national and civic identities have been constructed in the Republic of Moldova since its independence from the Soviet Union looking in particular at how architecture and urban planning have been used to express ideas of Moldovan nationhood, and how citizens respond to and reshape these visions in their everyday environments.
In her talk she examines the concept of “ruralization” in Chișinău, the capital of the Republic of Moldova. By challenging conventional narratives of urbanization as a unilinear process, it argues that rural identities and practices persist and are reasserted within Chișinău’s urban spaces, blurring the urban-rural boundary. This hybridity, influenced by Moldova’s complex history under various imperial rules, is evident in vernacular architecture, subsistence practices, and a cultural valorization of the village as a core national identity marker. The talk contends that Chișinău’s “urban rurality” offers an alternative vision of urban life, resisting teleological models of modernity and fostering a unique socio-spatial landscape.
