On Wednesday, December 14, you are cordially invited to the roundtable discussion, “Doing the History of Soviet Knowledge: Ethics, Epistemology and Practice in the Context of Russia’s War in Ukraine,” featuring four panelists:
Julia Obertreis (Friedrich Alexander University, Erlangen, Germany)
Aro Velmet (University of Southern California)
Taylor Zajicek (Princeton University)
Serhii Zhabin (Dobrov Institute for Scientific and Technological Potential and Science History Studies, Kyiv, Ukraine)
Moderator: Eglė Rindzevičiūtė (Kingston University London)
Responding to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, this panel re-examines changing approaches to the history of Soviet knowledge exploring the epistemological, ethical and practical aspects of doing historical research into Soviet science and technology. Much of the history of Soviet science and technology has been written from a Russia-centric position, in this way reproducing the colonial relation between the Soviet centres and the periphery. This position is no longer tenable: Russia’s invasion in Ukraine has evidenced Kremlin’s lasting colonial claim on the neighbouring countries. There is a risk that a continued focus on Soviet power centres will replicate the Cold War rationale of “knowing the enemy,” as detailed by David Engerman. At the same time, it is imperative to understand the developments and failures of scientific modernisation of Russia and the ways it is entangled with the former Soviet republics. The question is how to conduct this research in an ethical way, developing new epistemological approaches and practical strategies of accessing primary sources. The roundtable participants will reflect on their experience of researching the intersections of Soviet science and governance in Central Asian, Baltic countries and Ukraine. Each participant will speak for about 10 minutes, leaving an ample time for discussion.
Prof Julia Obertreis is Chair of Modern and East European History, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität, Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany. Prof Obertreis received her PhD in History from Freie Universität Berlin in 2001. She is the author of Imperial Desert Dreams: Cotton Growing and Irrigation in Central Asia, 1860-1991 (V & R Unipress, 2017), which explores the infrastructural modernisation of Soviet Central Asia, using the archives in Tashkent. Prof Obertreis' research interests encompass the Russian imperial and Soviet colonialism in Central Asia, the history of planning, infrastructure and the environment in the state socialist context and transnational circulation of knowledge. She is also an expert on oral history and is currently participating in a project called "Oral History digitally" (Oral-History.Digital) which aims at creating a digital research platform based on different collections of interviews.
Dr Aro Velmet is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Southern California, USA. Having received his PhD in History and French Studies from New York University in 2017, Dr Velmet is a historian of modern Europe, with a particular interest in the intersection of technological change and forms of governance, claims about humanitarian development, and global modeling. He has associated interests in the history of gender and sexuality, as well as the history of modern empires. Velmet’s current research projects include a history of bacteriology and imperialism in the French colonies, and a history of cybernetics, data processing, and global development from an Eastern European perspective. From 2016-2018 he was one of the curators for the new permanent exhibition of the Estonian Museum of Freedom. Dr Velmet is the author of Pasteur's Empire: Bacteriology and Politics in France, Its Colonies, and the World (Oxford University Press, 2019) and articles on gender, cultural memory and e-society in Estonia.
Taylor Zajicek is a PhD student at Princeton University, USA. He is a historian of environmental change in modern Eurasia and the Near East. Zajicek’s dissertation, “Black Sea, Cold War,” explores the entanglement of geopolitics, science, and environment in the greater Black Sea region from 1933 to 1993. Zajicek’s research draws on sources from more than two dozen archives in Armenia, Russia, Turkey, Ukraine, and the United States. This fieldwork was supported by the Social Science Research Council, Fulbright-Hays Program, and Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES). Zajicek’s research on imperial Russian seismology has been recently published in Central Asian Survey Central Asian Survey.
Dr Serhii A. Zhabin is a Senior Researcher at the Department of History and Sociology of Science and Technology, Dobrov Institute for Scientific and Technological Potential and Science History Studies of National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, Kyiv, Ukraine. He received his PhD (Candidate) in Historical Sciences specializing in the History of Science and Technology in 2013. Dr Zhabin published articles on the legacy of the computer scientist Viktor Glushkov and the All-Union Automation System (OGAS) in the development of Ukrainian computer science, and on Gennadii Dobrov’s work on “machine methods”. He conducts sociological surveys in young scholars’ group in the Ukrainian academia. He also works as a populariser of science and organiser of “Наукові зустрічі / Scientific meetings” lecture series (https://bit.ly/3F0dQMi).
The meeting will be held on Thursday, December 14, at 8 am (Los Angeles) / 11 аm (New York) / 16:00 (UK) / 18:00 (Kyiv) / 19:00 (Moscow).
Join Zoom Meeting
https://mit.zoom.us/j/93665011585?pwd=eExmZEFsamtGRm85WWVVRC9mMmJvQT09
Please feel free to share this announcement with your colleagues.
I hope you will join us for this exciting discussion!
Re-post from CHORUS: Colloquium for the History of Russian and Soviet Science - https://www.facebook.com/groups/237672347539062
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