Reassembling the Environmental Archives of the Cold War
Perspectives from the Russian North
Time: Fri 2021-08-20 16.00
Subject area: History of Science, Technology and Environment
Doctoral student: Dmitry V. Arzyutov , Historiska studier av teknik, vetenskap och miljö
Opponent: Assistant Professor Bathsheba Demuth, Brown University
Supervisor: Docent Peder Roberts, Historiska studier av teknik, vetenskap och miljö; Professor Per Högselius, Infrastruktur, Historiska studier av teknik, vetenskap och miljö; Associate Professor Julia Lajus, Higher School of Economics in Saint Petersburg
Abstract
To what extent the environmental history of the Arctic can move beyond the
divide between Indigenous peoples and newcomers or vernacular and academic
ways of knowing? The present dissertation answers this question by developing the
notion of an environmental archive. Such an archive does not have particular reference
to a given place but rather it refers to the complex network that marks the relations
between paper documents and human and non-human agencies as they are able to
work together and stabilise the conceptualisation of a variety of environmental
objects. The author thus argues that the environment does not only contain
information about the past but just like any paper (or audio and video) archive is
able to produce it through the relational nature of human-environment interactions.
Through the analysis of five case studies from the Russian North, the reader is
invited to go through various forms of environmental archives which in turn
embrace histories of a number of disciplines such as palaeontology, biology,
anthropology, and medicine. Every case or a “layer” is presented here as a contact
zone where Indigenous and academic forms of knowledge are not opposed to each
other but, on the contrary, are able to interact and consequently affect the global
discussions about the Russian Arctic. This transnational context is pivotal for all the
cases discussed in the dissertation. Moreover, by putting the Cold War with its
tensions between two superpowers at the chronological center of the present work,
the author aims to reveal the multidimensionality of in situ interactions with, for
instance, the paleontological remains or the traces of all-terrain vehicles and their
involvement into broader science transnational cooperations and competitions. As a
result, the heterogeneous archives allow us to reconsider the environmental history
of the Russian North and the wider Arctic and open a new avenue for future research
transcending the geopolitical and epistemic borders of knowledge production.