Special Sections: Remembering Diversity in East-Central European Cityscapes and Russias Annexation of Crimea I. Based on up-to-date field material, this issue focuses on the palimpsest-like environments of East-Central European borderland cities. The present shapes and contents of these urban environments derive from combinations of cultural continuities and political ruptures, present-day heritage industries and collective memories about the contentious past, expressive material forms and less conspicuous meaning-making activities of human actors; they evolve from perpetual tensions between the choices of the present and the weight of the past. The contributors address a set of key questions: What is specific about the transnationalization of memory in these urban public spaces? What are the political rationales and ramifications of the different approaches taken to the legacies of perished population groups in different cities? How do these approaches relate to European dimensions of memory and the European vector of identity-making of the contemporary urban populations?
Eleonora Narvselius, PhD, is an anthropologist affiliated with the Centre for Language and Literature and Center for European Studies at Lund University. She is the author of Ukrainian Intelligentsia in Post-Soviet Lviv: Narratives, Identity and Power (Lexington Books, 2012), and co-editor (with Gelinada Grinchenko) of Traitors, Collaborators and Deserters in Contemporary European Politics of Memory: Formulas of Betrayal (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). She recently participated in the international project Memory of Vanished Population Groups and Societies in Todays East- and Central European Urban Environments. Memory Treatment and Urban Planning in Lviv, Chernivci, Chisinau and Wrocław (funded by the Swedish research foundation Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, 2011-2014).
Andrey Makarychev is guest professor at the Johan Skytte Institute of Political Science at the University of Tartu. His areas of expertise include EURussia studies, the EURussia common neighborhood, and regionalism in the post-Soviet space. He is co-author (with Alexandra Yatsyk) of Celebrating Borderlands in a Wider Europe. Nations and Identities in Ukraine, Georgia and Estonia (Nomos, 2016) and Lotmans Cultural Semiotics and the Political (Rowman and Littlefield, 2017). His articles appeared in Russian Politics, Region: Regional Studies of Russia, Eastern Europe and Central Asia, Ethnopolitics, Geopolitics, Slavic Review, Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe, and other academic outlets.
Andreas Umland is Senior Non-Resident Fellow at the Center for European Security in the Institute of International Relations at Prague, Principal Researcher of the Institute for Euro-Atlantic Cooperation at Kyiv, and General Editor of the ibidem-Verlag book series Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society.
Julie Fedor is Senior Lecturer in Modern European History at the University of Melbourne.
Gergana Dimova is an associate lecturer in global politics at the University of Winchester (United Kingdom). She received her PhD in political science from Harvard University and was a Jeremy Haworth Research Fellow at St Catharines College at the University of Cambridge.
