Online event by CHORUS: Colloquium for the History of Russian and Soviet Science , Thursday, May 16, at 8 am (Los Angeles) / 11 аm (New York) / 17:00 (CET) / 18:00 (Kyiv) / 19:00 (UTC+03:00)
Maria Pirogovskaya (independent researcher, Berlin), Vernacular bone-setting and Tashkent Institute for Traumatology and Orthopaedic Treatment in the post-war era: Knowledge colonised, appropriated or ‘braided’?
Ilona Jurkonytė (Vilnius University), Configurations of Space Botany in Art
(for link to the meeting please write to jan.surman@gmail.com)
Details:
Maria Pirogovskaya (independent researcher, Berlin), Vernacular bone-setting and Tashkent Institute for Traumatology and Orthopaedic Treatment in the post-war era: Knowledge colonised, appropriated or ‘braided’?
In 1953, an Uzbek military doctor submitted a medical dissertation on the topic of Central Asian vernacular bone-setting. While framed as a quackery and a threat for the Soviet public health, bone-setting practiced by urban healers was nevertheless considered worthy of painstaking inspection both by the aspiring postgraduate surgeon and his supervisors in Tashkent Clinic for Traumatology and Orthopaedic Treatment. In the next decades, vernacular methods, skills, and particularly medicinal matter were carefully explored and tested, which changed the surgeon’s career as well as epistemic and social trajectories of the phenomena under his study. The talk focuses on extractive-cum-cooperative relationships between state-sponsored medical research and vernacular healing and discusses the heuristic potential of frameworks of colonisation, appropriation, and braiding in regard of ethnic knowledge in the long shadow of Soviet medicine.
Maria Pirogovskaya is medical anthropologist and historian of medicine. Her research interests include subjectivity, therapeutic landscapes, knowledge systems, and the senses in late Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union. She is the author of Miasmata, Symptoms, and Evidence: Smells in Russian Culture, 1850–1900s (in Russian) (European Univ. Press, 2018), which discusses the social and cultural entanglements of olfactory vigilance, public health, and modernism in the Russian Empire. Her current research projects focus on the legacies of imperial medicine after the Russian Revolution and the history of the interaction of the ethnomedical knowledge of Eastern Siberia and Central Asia with Soviet state medicine.
https://mpiwg-berlin-mpg.academia.edu/MariaPirogovskaya
Ilona Jurkonytė (Vilnius University), Configurations of Space Botany in Art
The first complete plant growth cycle in zero gravity was achieved in the early 1980s by the Soviet scientific institutions that were stretched across the USSR. That period was the peak of Cold War tensions and international campaigning for nuclear disarmament. Collaboration between Soviet and Western scientists took place, yet all international communications went through Moscow and thus the visibility of contributions by non-Russian USSR scientists on a global scale was erased. This condition exemplified the dynamics in both science and cultural productions of the entire USSR. In this talk, I invite us to think together, how can we research the history of space botany today? What are the limitations of the Cold War epistemic framing? What methodological approaches could be useful when investigating the history of space botany from a perspective of a fragment of the space research infrastructure? What could film and media studies, as well as artistic research, bring to this area of exploration?
A link to compilation of excerpts from audiovisual installation Arabidopsis Thaliana, Museum of Modern Art Bogota 2021, co-authored by Ilona Jurkonytė and Santiago Reyes Villaveces https://vimeo.com/542859164
Ilona Jurkonytė is a film and media researcher and a Vilnius University Foundation Scholar. Previously Ilona was a Vanier Scholar at Concordia University (2015-2019), where she defended her PhD in Film and Moving Image program. Her background that merges philosophy (BA), art history and criticism (MA), media and communication studies (MA), and film and moving image studies (PhD). Her research interests span transnational film studies, environmental media studies, artistic research and film curation. Ilona’s work critically examines tensions between notions of the national and transnational in moving image production and circulation, as well as their geo- and hydro- political implications. She engages with environmental media approach to rethink coloniality in the Global Easts and beyond. Ilona is currently preparing a manuscript, based on her doctoral research, entitled “From Temperature of the War to Descending Clouds: US Bomb Archive and the Marshall Islands.” The project reconceptualizes the relationship between nuclear media archives, militarization, and the environment.
https://www.tspmi.vu.lt/en/zmogus/ilona-jurkonyte/
