“Unsure whether it feels like home anymore”: Unsettled feelings amongst former panel-block residents in Moscow and Berlin

In 2017, Moscow launched an urban renewal campaign proposing to tear down eight thousand panel-block apartment buildings aiming to relocate over a million and a half residents into newly built high-rises. The campaign provoked diverse reactions ranging from anger to excitement for the chance to improve living conditions. The author began ethnographic research on the eve of the first phase of demolition in 2021, inviting Moscow-, and Berlin-based artists to examine the stories, memories, and feelings of their panel-block homes in a collaborative visual anthropology research project. In 2022, Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine interrupted research, beckoning the author to reevaluate their study from affective and ethical positions. Studying responses to the war using autoethnographic methods allowed the author to acknowledge disaffection and withdrawal as significant emotional responses to the threat of political violence—dispositions that make for ethnographically and ethically important moments of research.