If no one can quite agree on where the East begins or ends, one thing seems certain: its very indeterminacy is central to its Eastness. From the demise of the Second World as a geopolitical category to attempts to stitch together dialogues between postsocialist and postcolonial conjunctures, from debates about the relative Westness of parts of East Asia and to the multiple legacies of imperialism that endure across “the entire stretch of land from the former GDR to Japan”, ‘East’ has long been approached as both a peripheralised place and a space of ever-movable in-betweenness.

Given the tendency to locate the concept of ‘East’ within such shifting transnational terrain, there has been a surprising lack of research into questions of migrancy and border-crossing resonating across ‘Eastern’ Europe and ‘East’ Asia. Entangled Easts proposes to bring together scholars and artist-researchers across the social sciences, arts, and humanities in a research network to map, examine, and interrogate migrant and bordering practices as they are experienced at the intersections of multiple ‘Easts’, focusing on interwoven temporalities, migration routes, and embodied connections and epistemologies.

The research questions guiding the network relate to how ‘East’ is articulated beyond geographic narratives and imperial imaginaries. Decentering Eurocentric and Westercentric delineations of ‘East’, the network will explore the multiple temporal and cross-border connections between distinct localities and their relation to coloniality, peripheralisation, diasporic identities, and emergent political and cultural visions of entangled routes. In tending to the aesthetic, political, and affective concerns of artistic practices on the border, we examine how emergent ‘migrant grammars’ can connect differently situated experiences of and within ‘Easts’ to look toward alternative imaginaries and new visions for cross-border and cross-temporal belonging. What roots and routes emerge when tending the entangled epistemologies of Easts? How might artistic and cultural practices surface and articulate these?