The Multiple Afterlives of Scientific Research on the Kazakh Steppe

• In Event: Thinking with the Steppes as an Environmental, Socio-Political, and Epistemic Space

Abstract

This paper explores the afterlives of scientific research on the Kazakh Steppe. During the late Soviet period, scientific research institutions flourished in the Kazakh SSR, largely in response to the unique challenges of conducting agriculture in the steppe biome. An enormous corpus of experiments, trials, specimen collections, and soil samples were amassed in the decades during and after the Virgin Lands Campaign. Today, ecologists are using this same data to demonstrate the scale of environmental degradation that occurred as a result of agricultural cultivation. In this paper, I examine the multiple lives of Russian and Soviet soil data—and the corresponding theories that developed to interpret it—and how contemporary scientists are both subverting and co-opting data produced in a different historical context to advocate for environmental change in the twenty-first century.

Author

• Gail Bratcher, U of Chicago