About the workshop:
This workshop aims to develop a multidisciplinary dialogue on the entanglements of politics, society, ecology, environment, health, and disease in the regions of East-Central Europe, Russia, the Caucasus, and Central Asia, bringing together scholars in the history of medicine and the medical humanities with scholars in environmental history and the environmental humanities.
It aims to deepen understandings of regional particularities and traditions, including a possible divergence in approaches to environment and health in Eurasia from approaches taken in other regions, such as Western Europe, East Asia, and South Asia.
At the same time, the workshop aims to explore the local, transnational, international, and global connections, circulations, and integrations that cut through and extend beyond the regions of Eurasia and call its distinctiveness into question. It aims to foster a discussion about what the study of the regions of Eurasia might contribute to the developing fields of medical-environmental humanities and medical-environmental history.
Questions that the workshop will address include:
- Where were links between the physical environment, health, and disease made visible in the regions of Eurasia, and where were they obscured? How can these developments be explained?
- Which categories, concepts, disciplines, and practices were employed to analyse and enact the relationship between environment, health, and disease in the regions of Eurasia, and how did these shape approaches to managing, protecting, building in, and transforming the physical environment? Who were the main actors participating in these processes?
Workshop registration
The event will be streamed via Zoom. If you would like to join via zoom, please register here. Deadline for registration is May 26.
There are some limited spaces for participation in-person at the workshop. If interested, please contact: Johanna.Conterio@iakh.uio.no
For the call for papers, see here.
Workshop program
Thursday, 1 June 2023:
8:30-9:00 - Coffee
9:00-10:15 - THE BODIES OF HUMANS & OTHER ANIMALS
Chair: David Roger Bannister (University of Oslo)
Claire Shaw (Warwick University): “Conceptualizing the ‘Useful Body’ in the USSR: Labour Capacity, Disability and the Influence of Environments”
Anna Toropova (University of Copenhagen): “Constitution or Environment? Iurii Kannabikh, Shattered Nerves and the Psychoneuroses of Revolution”
Iryna Skubii (Queens University): “Animals, Diseases, and More-Than-Human Dimensions of Famines in Soviet Ukraine”
10:30-11:45 - MULTISPECIES HEALTH AND DISEASE
Chair: Mingyuan Zhang (University of Oslo)
Anna Mazanik (German Historical Institute, Moscow): “Ticks, Humans, and the Soviet Project: Exploring the Environmental History of Tick-Borne Encephalitis in Eurasia”
Julia Malitska (Södertörn University): “Nutritional controversies in the fin de siècle Russian Empire: People’s Health, Dietary Reform and the ‘Meat Question’”
Susanne Bauer (University of Oslo): “Fallout and food webs from the ground up: multispecies legacies of nuclear testing in Kazakhstan”
11:45-1:15 - DISEASE ECOLOGIES
Chair: Nhung Lu (University of Oslo)
Einar Wigen and Ingrid Eskild (University of Oslo): “Plague’s Concepts of Europe”
Susan Jones (University Minnesota): “Donors and Recipients: Soviet Scientists’ Conceptualization of a Disease Reservoir on the Steppes, 1930s-1960s”
Clemens Günther (Freie University): “The Infectious Periphery: Pandemics and the (Post)Colonial Question in the Russian Empire”
Marek Eby (New York University): “Landscapes and Lifeways of Socialism: Malaria Ecologies of Soviet Kyrgyzstan, 1925-1939”
1:15-1:45 Lunch
1:45-3:00 - MICROBIAL ENTANGLEMENTS
Chair: Ayse Nalan Azak (University of Oslo)
Dmitriy Myelnikov (Cambridge University): “‘The unbreakable bond between the organism and the environment’: Bacteriophage therapy as an ecological pursuit in Soviet Georgia”
Miriam F. Lipton (Oregon State University): “Better Together? Soviet Combination Antibiotic Therapy with Bacteriophages in the 1950s and 1960s”
Serina Tarkhanian (The Oslo School of Architecture and Design) and Corinne Aivazian (Terra Ancestral): “Healing Earths: Exploring remedial entanglements and materiality of Armenian clay”
3:15-4:45 - KEYNOTE
Chair: Johanna Conterio (University of Oslo)
Kate Brown (MIT): “Communist Bodies and Capitalist Bodies: What Radiation Medicine Tells us about Cold War Understandings of Ecological Health”
Register for the talk through this link.
5:00-6:15 - THE HUMAN MIND IN TIME, SPACE, AND ENVIRONMENT
Chair: Leonoor Zuiderveen Borgesius (University of Oslo)
Chechesh Kudachinova (Mannheim University): “Emerek, Environment, and Colonialism: Exploring the Frontier of Mental Disorder in Northeast Eurasia, 1880s-1920s”
Matthew P. Romaniello (Weber State University): “The Question of Russia’s ‘Mixed’ Peoples: Linnaeus, the Academy of Sciences, and the Eighteenth-Century Taxonomic Project”
Ana Hedberg Olenina (Arizona State University): “Resonant Space: Kinesthesia and Immersive Experience in Sonorous Media Environments of Sergei Eisenstein and Lev Theremin”
7:00 Workshop Dinner
Trattoria Popolare, Trondheimsveien 2, 0560 Oslo
Friday, 2 June 2023:
8:30-9:00 - Coffee
9:00-10:15 - URBAN PLANNING, ARCHITECTURE, AND HEALTH
Chair: Nikhil Malik (University of Oslo)
Maria C. Taylor (Princeton University): “Plants at Plants: the Phyto-Mitigation of Industrial Hazards in Stalin-era Urbanism”
Zeynep Ece Sahin Korkan (Technical University of Munich): “Healing Landscapes: Women, Ecology, and Healthcare in fin de siècle Istanbul”
Anna Batzeli (Aristotle University): “Insufficient Water Supply Management and Typhoid Fever Outbreaks: a case-study from interwar Andros, Greece”
10:30-11:45 - MIGRATION, MOBILITY, HEALTH, AND ENVIRONMENT
Chair: Ingrid Eskild (University of Oslo)
Elena Vishlenkova (Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies): “’Siberian health’ and ‘Caucasian longevity’: Soviet Bioregionalism in the 1970s-1990s”
Jo Laycock (University Manchester): “Refuge in an ‘Inhospitable Land’: Resettlement, Health and the Transformation of the Soviet Armenian Environment”
Ilana Kappanyos (Eötvös Loránd University, Hungary): “Local Expertise: The Role of Hungarian Visiting Nurses in Locations and Accessing Patients”
11:45-12:15 Lunch
12:15-1:30 - DISCIPLINARY KNOWLEDGE
Chair: Astrid Schrader (University of Exeter)
Marin Coudreau (CERCEC, CNRS, Paris) & Laurent Coumel (CREE, INALCO, Paris): “‘Geohygiene’: A Soviet Precursor for a Science of ‘Global Health?’”
Sergei Mokhov (Liverpool John Moores University): “Soviet oncology in a trap of infrastructure”
George Andrei (Indiana University, Bloomington): “A Wild Country: Miasmas, Climate, and Health and the Emergence of Forestry in Romania, 1886-1910”
1:30-2:00 Coffee
2:00-3:30 - TOXIC LANDSCAPES
Chair: Johannes Mattes (University of Oslo)
Marc Elie, CNRS (France): “Did the Soviet Union Collapse under an Environmental Health Crisis? Revisiting the Ecocide Thesis Thirty Years after”
Sarah Cameron (University of Maryland): “The Aral Syndrome: Health, Environment and the Retreat of Central Asia’s Aral Sea”
Tsz Ho Wong (University of Edinburgh): “Japan’s Pre-War Research on Chemical Warfare and Wartime Production of Related Weapons and Equipment”
Nicholas Breyfogle (Ohio State University): “Contaminated Waters: Debating the Meanings of Pollution at Lake Baikal”
3:30-4:45 - HEALING LANDSCAPES
Chair: Subhadeep Chowdhury (University of Oslo)
Temirlan Tileubek (University California, Davis): “Making New Soviet Children: Evgenii Radin and The Transformation of Childhood in Revolutionary Russia”
Slava Savova (Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Studies with Ethnographic Museum): “Atlas of Health: Hydrogeological Cartography and the Weaving of Healthscapes in Postwar Bulgaria”
Emma Friedlander (Harvard University): “Health and healing in the late Soviet ‘New Age’”
Contact details
Dr Johanna Conterio, conference convener
Associate Professor of Environmental History
University of Oslo
Department of Archaeology, Conservation and History
PB 1008, Blindern, NO-0315 Oslo, Norway
Johanna.Conterio@iakh.uio.no
The event has been supported by the Oslo School of Environmental Humanities, UiO:Life Science, and KLIMER: Climate, environment and energy.