Between the local and the transnational:

Through the example of post-Soviet Greeks, this paper aims to renegotiate the notions of locality and proximity and the ways in which the latter are refracted through transnational strategies and practices. Thus, by placing the familiar/unfamiliar dichotomy at the heart of our research, we seek to examine, on the basis of ethnographic data, the tropes of a cultural construction of intimacy. But how the latter is transfigured due to events such as the Russian-Ukrainian conflict and the western involvement, through cosmologies of resistance on the one hand or through a consensus with the neoliberal spirit of Western capitalism on the other? In what ways is there a production of “regimes of intimacy” in which contradictory practices and discourses are involved, plunging into futility any attempts to create a homogenous narrative? Greek post-soviet diasporas rather end up being fluid categories: not only through acts of integration in Western neoliberal normality, but also through worldviews that gaze nostalgically at the most conservative versions and values of soviet social and political organization, found in the example of contemporary Russia. This article therefore seeks to trace human journeys and lived experiences, and through them to re-approach relationships of proximity, intimacy, within and beyond borders, in the real and digital world.