This Thursday: paper presentation in St Petersburg by David Moon

The American Steppe: Influences from Russia on the Great Plains

 

On 26th March, Anniversary Professor of the University of York (UK) David Moon will present his paper “The American Steppe: Influences from Russia on the Great Plains” at the regular research seminar “Boundaries of History” of the Center for Historical Research and the Department of History of the Higher School of Economics in Saint Petersburg.

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CFP: Scientific Seminar on "Environmental History of the Siberian North : Promising Research Directions"

Dear Colleagues

On 15-16 October 2015, Surgut State Pedagogical University will be holding a scientific seminar on 

"Environmental History of the Siberian North : Promising Research Directions"

Environmental historians from the USA and Europe consider Russia to be a great country with unique natural conditions, particularly interesting as it is little known. This is particularly true of the Siberian North which was only recently, and rapidly, developed. At the start of this development the main need was to relate the amount of resources extracted to the needs of industrial development with environmental protection as necessary. These factors make this region interesting for historical-ecology researches both in theoretical and also practical fields.

The main goal of the seminar is to discuss the results of existing research on the environmental history of the Siberian North, both theoretical and methodological, and explore the possibilities for new historical research on the origins and evolution of contradictions between people and nature in this region. We aim to develop a professional dialogue discussing the main theoretical and methodological problems of environmental history.

The program will include members’ reports and roundtables, as well as a cultural program.

The working languages are Russian and English.

The Conference Committee proposes the following themes for roundtables:

• Historical experience of nature management in the Siberian North: «experience of history» and «experience of historian»,

• The history of regional environmental policy in the Russian Empire and Soviet Union: the «north variant».

• Natural resources, natural management and natural protection in the North of Siberia in the historical past;

• Models of interaction between society and nature in the North of Siberia in the 17^th – 20^th century.

To take part in the conference, please send a request (details of information to include below) and the text of your article (3 000 - 5 000 words) not later 31 August 2015 to the e-mail: surgut.envhist@gmail.com.  

The requirements for the article’s format are also given below.

The seminar proceedings will be published. 

The Conference Committee maintain the right to reject requests and articles proposed for publication.

Travel, accommodation and subsistence to be paid for by the participant.

Any questions, please contact the Conference Committee by e-mail: reiseleiter@mail.ru or tel. +7(982) 188 1736/ +7 (913) 143 6440 (Maksim Mostovenko).

Please provide the following information with your request:

1. Name and Family name, academic rank, work position, place of work
2. Contact tel. and e-mail
3. Theme of article
4. Curriculum Vitae including your scientific field and main research themes. (Please send this as a MS Word or pdf file in a separate attachment)
5. Text of article

Please send your article in the following format:

Format – А4. Field 2 sm. Type – Times New Roman, size of type – 14, line interval 1,5, indention 1,25, annealing of text – on width.

A list of references should be given at the end of the article. The references in the text should be given in square brackets  [1, p 20].

Articles may be published in Russian or English

The text of the article must include an abstract (not more 250 words) and a list of key words (5-10 words).

The first page must have :

• name and family name of the author on the first line,
• place of work on the second line
• theme of the article on the third line 
• text of article on the fourth line

Example:

John Mill Surgut State Pedagogical University Theme of article      Abstract. An abstract in English.      Key words. Key words in English      Text of article. Text of article. Text of article. Text of article. Text of article. Text of article. Text of article. Text of article. Text of article. Text of article. Text of article. Text of article. Text of article. Text of article. Text of article. Text of article. Text of article. Text of article. Text of article…

Sounds from dangerous places book with audio CDs: Chernobyl

‘Sonic Journalism’ is the aural equivalent of photojournalism. It describes the practice where field recordings play a major role in the discussion and documentation of places, issues and events and where listening to sounds of all kinds strongly informs the approach to research and following narratives whilst on location.

On two trips to Chernobyl in May 2006 and July 2007, Peter Cusak made many location recordings in and around the ‘exclusion zone’ in Ukraine. These include sounds of wildlife, radiometer bleeps, eerie rooms in the ghost town of Pripyat, work that still goes on around the nuclear reactors, and songs and poems of the traditional people of the affected area. Their stories are in many respects the least known of the disaster.

See and hear more at http://sounds-from-dangerous-places.org/chernobyl.html

"Waiting for the Sea": BBC article on the Aral Sea

It took just 40 years for the Aral Sea to dry up. Fishing ports suddenly found themselves in a desert.

But in one small part of the sea, water is returning...

Read the full article (published 25.2.15) on the BBC website at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-31588720

Call For Papers: "Global Environmental Histories from Below"

Global Environmental Histories from Below

Call for Papers

Special Issue of

Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities

http://www.resiliencejournal.org

Robert Morrissey and Roderick Wilson, editors

We seek submissions for a special, peer-reviewed issue focusing on “Global Environmental Histories from Below” -- by which we mean historical work that tells the history of environmental, social, and cultural change from the bottom up.  Aiming for a truly global conversation, we hope to bring together scholars with a broad range of geographical and temporal concerns for a mix of essays that will be both methodological and topical.  Digging below the level of empire and nation-state, this special issue will draw on local case studies from around the world to imagine and develop a set of frameworks for telling global environmental histories from a grassroots perspective. 

Submissions should feature the viewpoint of the voiceless, underrepresented, or socially marginalized wherever possible. They might come at “the below” from a variety of angles, including but not limited to the following:

Indigenous environmental histories: work that addresses the intersection of native peoples and their historical relations with local, regional and interregional environments; 

 Environmental histories of agriculture and fishing: work that might range from agronomy to farming the sea to explore the long and complex history people have shared with plants, animals, and other historical actors at a variety of scales; 

 Vernacular knowledges: work that explores how tacit knowledge of the environment is learned and transmitted and how local bodies of knowledge have been changed or lost with the introduction of scientific management of natural environments.

Submissions should be no more than 7000 words, including notes.

Deadline for submissions is May 15, 2015.

For further information please contact Bob Morrissey at rmorriss@illinois.edu and Rod Wilson at riwilson@illinois.edu.

Siberian Tiger Census - a newspaper article

More than 2,000 people are combing Russia’s far east for signs of the elusive wild cats to find out whether efforts to reverse their decline have been a success...

Read the full illustrated article in The Guardian at:

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/feb/18/siberian-tiger-census-in-russias-far-east

Call for Papers "Resistance, protest and criticism in the name of nature: USSR and post-Soviet states, 1950-2010"

Call for Papers

Resistance, protest and criticism in the name of nature: USSR and post-Soviet states, 1950-2010

Conference in Moscow, 8-9 October 2015

EcoGlobReg | DHI | CFR

To view this information as a pdf, click on http://f.hypotheses.org/wp-content/blogs.dir/1906/files/2015/02/CfP_Resistance_Nature_2015_en.pdf 

To view this information in Russian as a pdf, click on http://f.hypotheses.org/wp-content/blogs.dir/1906/files/2015/02/CfP_Resistance_Nature_2015_ru.pdf

This conference will look at resistance in the name of nature against industrialist and transformist projects in the Soviet and post-Soviet space from the 1950s to the present. How did people at local and regional levels mobilize nature in their practices of discontent (open protests, passive resistance, lawsuits and others) when confronting industrial interests, state projects and rampant transformations that impacted their lifestyle and violated their conception of a proper environment? 

In the environmental history of the Soviet Union we usually emphasize the unstoppable bulldozer of progress that turned the rivers into dam cascades, irrigated dry steppes, drained peat bogs, placed nuclear power stations and highly polluting industries near densely populated areas, and destroyed natural and traditional landscapes. Most of the time we present the productivist thrust of the Soviet state as advancing unchallenged, with the force of quasi-historical necessity. Although ecological activists from urban areas have been closely studied by historians (Weiner, Josephson), we have little research on the protest culture of the people affected by these transformations and how they confronted the risks and nuisances associated with them in the Soviet and post-Soviet world: peasants and landowners, indigenous peoples, nomad herders, workers at polluting plants, inhabitants of contaminated areas, hunters and fishermen, “unorganized” tourists and so on. 

We wish to put three groups of actors to the fore: first, we want to give a voice to those social actors who refused the obligatory direction of history toward the industrial control of nature (understood as natural resources) and cherished modes of interacting with their local or regional environment other than what “modernization” dictated, or more modestly tried to avoid the most disastrous transformations. How did they express their concerns and what alternative conceptions of nature did they defend?

Second, we study the interaction of state actors informed by visions of a tamed and useful nature with the people who felt directly concerned by their projects. How did Party leaders and state administrators take these challenges and checks into account if at all, whether crushing, ignoring, compensating or integrating them? What compromises in their initial plans were they prepared to make in the name of differing conceptions of the use of nature and a healthy environment?

Third, scientific and technical experts played an important mediating role between local people and decision-makers. How did they create, frame and advocate environmental issues? Or alternatively, how did they make environmental change appear acceptable and desirable to the people it affected?

By drawing attention to bottom-up resistance on behalf of nature from the 1950s and how it was suppressed, incorporated or bypassed in the USSR and its successor States, we hope to go some way in explaining the upsurge of environmental activism in the perestroika years and understanding the significance and limits of its decline in the post-Soviet period.

Here is a non-exhaustive list of possible topics:

·         What role did international contacts and globalized environmental concepts play in formulating ecological issues and mobilizing opinion around them?

·         How did industrial pollution impact workers and their families?

·         How did opposition to nuclear power and other industrial sites arise, up to the mass rallies of the 1980s?

·         How did usage conflicts develop, especially in the agricultural and tourist sectors (soils, forest, water, pasture)?

·         How did state actors take account of the risks of progress in planning?

·         How were nature and related concepts (landscape, life, environment, ecology) mobilized in the negotiations around industrial implantation and transformist projects?

 

Organization

The conference will be held on 8-9 October 2015 in Moscow (exact location will be announced later). Working languages will be Russian and English.

Abstracts (in Russian or English, no more than 400 words) should be submitted by email to in-the-name-of-nature@ecoglobreg.org by 15 March 2015. The organizers will respond by 15 May 2015. 

All queries should be sent to Melanie Arndt and Laurent Coumel.

The selected speakers will have their travel and accommodation expenses covered.

Papers will be requested by 15 September 2015 so as to be circulated among speakers in advance of the conference.

 

Institutional and financial support

The German Historical Institute (www.dhi-moskau.org) and the French-Russian Research Center (www.centre-fr.net) in Moscow contribute to financing the conference and provide essential organisational support.

 

Initiators

EcoGlobReg is a joint French-German historical research project financed by Agence National de la Recherche (ANR) and Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG). It is devoted to understanding how ecological concerns shaped society and politics in the late Soviet Union and the post-Soviet space. We analyse the sometimes tumultuous processes associated with the ecologization and de-ecologization of politics and society in the last three decades of the 20th century. By “ecologization” we mean the social dissemination and deepening political use of scientific knowledge on the state of the environment. We isolate three main vectors for spreading ecological preoccupations in society and political discourse: social activism and protest for the protection of landscapes and life conditions; environmental disasters understood as catalysts of discontent and revealers of failed relationships between society and nature; and sensitization and popularization (in the media and education) of nature seen as threatened by economic development.

The project takes ecologization and de-ecologization to be essentially globalized processes. It shows how environmental issues acquired a global character at the turn of the 1960s-1970s and what role Soviet citizens played in this process. From there the project moves to asking whether the Soviet Union entered an “environmental turn” comparable to the one identified for capitalist countries. But transnational and globalizing trends are only one aspect of ecologization. The project pays attention to the regionalization of power dynamics: strengthened national and regional identities fired ecological mobilization in the perestroika years; well before that point in Soviet history, they played a major role in shaping environmental protest. Last, the apparent de-ecologization of public discourse in the post-Soviet era, marked by green activists withdrawing from the political scene, will be examined to see how environmental practices have evolved and taken on new forms.

www.ecoglobreg.org

EcoGlobReg’s Team:

Alexander Ananyev
Melanie Arndt
Laurent Coumel
Marc Elie
Klaus Gestwa
Raphael Schulte-Kellinghaus