Authors

Discussion

This paper contextualises the representationalist epistemology that underpins mainstream Eurasian area studies, and thus also the bias towards European Russian themes and epistemologies that has been identified by those intent on decolonisation. It shows how expanding our assumptions beyond a representationalist focus on ontologically distinct objects and their description offers new possibilities for researching the Russian Federation’s territories. I set out the genealogy of the Bodleian Libraries’ collection of perestroika-era newspapers, as I indicate its content. These newspapers were brought to the University of Oxford’s Bodleian Libraries by researchers during the 1980s and 1990s from across the Soviet Union, as Soviet and Socialist state borders and prohibitions were breaking down. They constitute a body of evidence about the territories and communities that produced them, according to representationalist epistemologies – however the validity and scope of this evidence are limited by representationalist separations between the objects of knowledge, and their representation. I draw on Karen Barad’s delineation of a performative epistemology to re-frame the perestroika newspaper collection as an ongoing process of mutually constitutive meaning and materiality, within which the objects of knowledge emerge in intra-action with their representation. I thus indicate the possibilities this collection holds beyond its status as representationalist evidence.