Dr Claudia Eggart
First Book Fellow 2025-26
Lived Geopolitics: Rescaling Market Infrastructures in Odesa and Bishkek from Soviet Collapse to Backlash Imperialism
Through extensive, multi-sited ethnography, my work tackles the nexus of macro-scale power politics and the micro-scale of everyday life at two sites that are intricately and intensely entangled with geopolitical dynamics: the 7Km Market in Odesa, and the Dordoi Bazaar in Bishkek.
More informationResearch outcomes
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Eggart, C. (2026)
Lived Geopolitics. The Production of Unorthodox Scalar Connections through Trade. Anthropological Theory. https://doi.org/10.21428/4566d66c.4a351a1
Blog posts
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First Book Fellowships Award Announcement
As part of a scheme to help recent PhD graduates turn their theses into publishable books, the ISRF has announced funding for seven researchers.
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Kyrgyzstan’s Dordoi Bazaar: a world made from shipping containers and a city within a city
When I left Ainura’s container-shop at the Dordoi Bazaar in Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan, I found the market eerily quiet. I had not noticed the passing of time, while she generously shared her life story with me.
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Biography
Dr Claudia Eggart is a social anthropologist with a Ph.D. from the University of Manchester and fellowships at COMPAS (Oxford), the Centre for the History of Emotions (Tampere), New Europe College (Bucharest), and the University of Fribourg.
Her research traces how everyday economies, infrastructure, and emotion intersect in lived experiences of geopolitics—from border and customs regimes to market mobilities and logistical life. Grounded in ethnography, oral history, and discourse analysis, she engages themes such as post-socialist transformation, crisis, and the social life of infrastructure to examine how shifting global orders are materialized and contested in everyday life. During the fellowship she will work on her book titled: Lived Geopolitics: Re-scaling Market Infrastructures from Soviet Collapse to Backlash Imperialism
Her research traces how everyday economies, infrastructure, and emotion intersect in lived experiences of geopolitics—from border and customs regimes to market mobilities and logistical life. Grounded in ethnography, oral history, and discourse analysis, she engages themes such as post-socialist transformation, crisis, and the social life of infrastructure to examine how shifting global orders are materialized and contested in everyday life. During the fellowship she will work on her book titled: Lived Geopolitics: Re-scaling Market Infrastructures from Soviet Collapse to Backlash Imperialism
Biographical details correct as of 20.07.26