City that oil built: narratives of oil in Baku's memorial landscape Dr Leyla Sayfutdinova Social Anthropology University of St Andrews and the Centre for Energy Ethics

In this talk, Dr Leyla Sayfutdinova will discuss how Baku's identity of an ‘oil city' has been constructed through the narratives on its urban spaces. Drawing on the concept of ‘petroleumscape' they will present three examples of narratives on oil and gas, inscribed in the city's memorial landscape.

Dr Leyla Sayfutdinova is a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Social Anthropology and the Centre for Energy Ethics. Her research project “Turning oil into stone: oil legacies in the narratives of urban continuity and change in Baku, Azerbaijan” examines the multiple ways in which oil has shaped urban space and memory in Baku, one of the earliest oil cities. Leyla has an interdisciplinary background, including Conflict studies (BA, St Petersburg State University) and Sociology (PhD, Middle East Technical University, Turkey) and her research has focused on the postsocialist transition in Azerbaijan, focusing on urban change, nationalism, and post-Soviet industrial restructuring. Her research has been published in Journal of Eurasian Studies, Labor History, Work, Employment and Society, and Nationalities Papers.
email [email protected] to register