Workshop: Managing Land, Soil and People

RHN 25/2014 | Event

Workshop: Managing Land, Soil and People
Environmental Knowledge and Expertise in Tsarist and Soviet Russia

Workshop at the GHI Moscow in Cooperation with the Collaborative Research Centre 923 “Threatened Orders” of the University of Tuebingen

Friday, 14 March 2014

10:00 Opening Address
Katja Bruisch, Klaus Gestwa

10:30 Keynote Lecture
Frank Uekötter: Green Revolution Dreams

12:00 – 13:30 Panel I: Resource Management as a Matter of Public Interest: Institutions and Hierarchies of Expertise

Marina Loskutova: Forest Management in the Russian Empire in the 1800s‑1860s: The Making of a Professional Community
Olga Elina: „Modernization from below“: Agricultural Societes, Zemstvos and the Institutionalization of Scientific Agronomy (Mid 19th – Early 20th Century)
Julia Lajus: Experts on Unknown Waters: Construction of Marine Fish Resources and the Destiny of Local Fishing Communities in the Russian North, 1895 – 1935

14:30 – 16:00 Panel II: Agriculture and the Quest for Rural Transformation

Ian Campbell: Between Resistance and Expropriation: Land Norms, Statistical Expertise and the Ambiguities of Late-Tsarist Resettlement
David Darrow: The Moral Economy of Revolution and Civil War: Land Norms after 1917
Sarah Cameron: Transforming the ‘Hungry Steppe’: Agriculture and Pastoral Nomadism in Soviet Kazakhstan, 1925-1928

16:30 – 18:00 Panel III: Scenarios of Environmental Decline: Knowledge Production and Preventive Measures

Anastasia Fedotova: Insect Pests, Crop Failures and the First Steps of the Agricultural Entomology in South Russia
Lutz Häfner: “Robber Economy“? Agricultural and Environmental Knowledge and its Transfer to the Peasantry in Late Imperial Russia
Laurent Coumel: A Renewal of Environmental Expertise on Land and Water Management in Soviet Russia: Attempts for a ‘Complex Use’ of Rivers and Lakes at the Beginning of the 1960s

Saturday, March 15

10:00 – 11:30 Panel IV: Challenges from the Periphery: Universal Claims and Local Constraints

Christian Teichmann: Bitter Lives, Bitter Choices: Irrigation Engineers in Central Asia, 1900-1950
Marc Elie: Agricultural Experts in the Virgin Land Campaign (1954-1963)
Valentina Roxo: Industrializing the Taiga: West Siberian Petroleum Science, Nature and People (1963-1990)

12:00 – 13:30 Panel V: Expertise on Display: Strategies of Communication and Legitimization

Stephen Brain: In Single File: Russian Railroads and the Russian Army as Environmental Protection Agencies, 1858-1917
Alexander Ananyev: Spatial Representations of Modernist Projects to Conquer, Explore and Transform the Far North and the Arctic in Exhibitions from 1935 to 1941
Julia Obertreis: Between Propaganda and Scientific-Technical Expertise: “Infrastructural Poetry” and Irrigation Management in Central Asia, 1950s to 1980s

14:30 – 15:30 Round Table Discussion
Katja Bruisch, Klaus Gestwa, Stephan Merl, Frank Uekötter

Contact: Katja Bruisch
Nakhimovskii Prospekt 51-21, Moskau
katja.bruisch@dhi-moskau.de