About the workshop
This workshop develops a dialogue on the entanglements of politics, society, ecology, environment, health, and disease in the history of the regions of East-Central Europe, Russia, the Caucasus, and Central Asia.
The workshop will bring together scholars in the history of medicine with scholars in environmental history and opening up dialogues with themes in the medical and environmental humanities.
Edited volume
The aim of the workshop is to prepare contributions to an edited volume of the same name.
The volume will 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 volume 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 field of medical-environmental history.
Questions
Questions that the volume contributions address include:
- Where were links between the physical environment, health, and disease made visible in the regions of Eurasia in the past, and where were they obscured? How can these developments be explained?
- What were the categories, concepts, disciplines, and practices employed to analyse and enact the relationship between environment, health, and disease in the regions? How were they distinctive from or entangled with approaches taken in other regions and at other times?
- How did these categories, concepts, disciplines, and practices shape approaches to managing, protecting, building in, and transforming the physical environment, including the built environment? Who were the main actors participating in these processes?
Workshop Program
Session One
10am-12pm Central European Summer Time (orientational time zone) (Norway, France, Germany)
Susan Jones (University of Minnesota), “Donors and Recipients: Soviet Scientists’ Conceptualization of a Disease Reservoir on the Steppes, 1930s-1960s”
Molly Walker (Harvard University), “The Main and Radical Measure: Situating Bodies of Water as a Primary Site of Georgia and Abkhazia’s Fight against Malaria, 1927-1937”
Iryna Skubii (University of Melbourne), “Animal Cemeteries as Spaces of Survival in Ukraine during the Holodomor”
Session Two
9am-11am Eastern Standard Time (USA) (orientational time zone)
Katja Bruisch (Trinity College Dublin), "The Political Ecology of the Working Body: Disease, Exhaustion, and Neglect in the Soviet Peat Industry"
Maria C. Taylor (Cornell University), “Plants at Plants: The Phyto-Mitigation of Industrial Hazards in Stalin-era Urbanism”
Marc Elie (The Centre for Russian, Caucasian and Central European Studies), “Did the Soviet Union Collapse under an Environmental Health Crisis? Revisiting the Ecocide Thesis Thirty Years after”
Session Three
11am-1pm Eastern Standard Time (USA) (orientational time zone)
Maria Pirogovskaya (independent scholar), “Early Soviet plant hunting in Transbaikalia: Re-networking Tibetan medicine between environments and epistemologies”
Marek Eby (New York University), “Landscapes and Lifeways of Socialism: Malaria Ecologies of Soviet Kyrgyzstan, 1925-1939”
Sarah Cameron (University of Maryland-College Park), “The Aral Syndrome: Health, Environment and the Retreat of Central Asia’s Aral Sea”
The volume is being edited by Dr Johanna Conterio, Associate Professor of Environmental History in the Department of Archaeology, Conservation and History at the University of Oslo.