The H2020-ITN-Markets fellows and supervisors held a two day workshop in the University of Helsinki just before the Annual Aleksanteri Conference, 23.-24.10.

The event was created jointly by the Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki and Stockholm School of Economics in Riga, and organized by Eugenia Pesci, Giulio Benedetti and Aleksanteri Institute intern Irene Milani. They had worked tirelessly to put together a program which started on Sunday with a visit to the Design Museum, giving our visitors a chance to learn about the evolution of Finnish lifestyle in one hour. Followed by an opportunity to enjoy Finnish Sauna and take a dip in the ocean, the arrival day ended with a cozy dinner in the center of Helsinki.

Following meetings in Istanbul and Tbilisi in the spring and autumn of 2022, the first meeting of 2023 of the MARKETS project took place on March 27th-30th in Leuven, Belgium. This event was co-organized by HIVA - Research Institute for Work and Society of KU Leuven and the School of Slavonic and East European Studies of the University College London (SSEES UCL). The organization committee was composed of ESRs Alexandra Fernandes (KU Leuven), Malika Toqmadi and Piotr Majda (UCL) and supervisors Jozef Pacolet (KU Leuven), Alena Ledeneva, Eric Gordy (UCL) and Abel Polese (project coordinator, DCU).

The contemporary literature on informality has established that informality is pervasive and not limited to a specific culture or geography. Entries in the Global Informality Project such as the old boy network and pulling strings in the UK to svart arbete (black work) in Sweden, serve as prime evidence that informality is a universal human reality, rather than a feature of developing societies (Kirkby & Trust, 2019; Larse, 2020; Polese, 2021; Smith, 2020). Loosely defined as an ‘activity performed by an individual or group of individuals … that eventually bypasses the state’, among the practical aims of informality studies is to identify alternatives to neoliberal governance approaches (Polese, 2021, p. 3). Formality and informality are conceptualised as representing a spectrum, being intertwined, and whose moral justifications are experienced subjectively (Ledeneva et al., 2017; Polese, 2021).

Doing academic research on informality is not a straightforward task. Add a gender dimension to it, the Central Asian context, and frame it within a very particular locality such as bazaars and - voilà! Now the study is narrowed down to the point where finding relevant literature is like looking for a needle in a haystack. Yet, I was lucky and managed to stumble upon a hidden gem: Regine Spector's Order at the Bazaar, a one-of-a-kind book on bazaars in Central Asia. And here’s why: rather than analysing the region's socioeconomic and political transformations from a macro perspective, Spector employs a "bottom-up" approach to discover how people on the ground perceive the changes and construct their own new reality after the breakup of the Soviet Union. This “bottom-up” narrative becomes the leitmotif of the entire book: order emerges from below despite the surrounding chaos. Even the author’s conceptualisation of order is the result of such grassroots effort. The five facets of "order" as outlined by Spector are cleanliness, rights (i.e., lawfulness), regulation, discipline (and respect), and peace (p. 16). These understandings are scrutinized throughout the manuscript and capture diversity of voices constructing orders at bazaars.

Last year from September to November, me and 5 research assistants collected qualitative and quantitative data for my PhD dissertation. The project is devoted to Central Asian migrant entrepreneurs in Moscow and Saint Petersburg. Although previously I lived in Central Asia for several years and spoke a common language with participants, this fieldwork was more challenging than my previous ones. Reading papers of fellow scholars before the field trip, I got a general idea that data collection is not gonna be easy. However, the article that convinced me that everything is possible was the work of Victor Agadjanian and Natalia Zotova called “Structure, culture, and HIV/STI vulnerabilities among migrant women in Russia” (2019). The paper was devoted to sexual life and risks of sexually transmitted diseases among migrant (majority of whom were Muslim) women in Russia. The scholars simply approached potential respondents in their work places. Asking unfamiliar Muslim women to tell total strangers about “the number of sexual partners, having unprotected sex, and having sexual intercourse while inebriated” (Agadjanian and Zotova, 2019, p. 53)! My project was much easier I was sure. However, first days in the field proved me wrong; informal and sometimes illegal practices migrant entrepreneurs implemented seemed to be not less sensitive subject than sexual life of Muslim women.

The purpose of the first and in-person MARKETS meeting was to get to know each other and discuss our research in a rather relaxing and informal atmosphere. The meeting was held during the Eurasian Insights EISCAS Final Conference in Ghent in September in which MARKETS project had two panels on informality and fieldwork process. The conference environment facilitated our conversations on informal practices, governance, borders, and (post-)colonialism, while the sunny weather gave us the chance to explore the city and each other’s career paths. Not to mention Ghent “classic” mussels & chips places that allowed many of those conversations and discussions. So, here I take the opportunity to reflect on what has been discussed during the conference panels and in-between.