Thinking with the Steppes as an Environmental, Socio-Political, and Epistemic Space

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

From Qazaqstan to Ukraine, in this panel we examine the steppe(s) as a place, an archive, an agent, a knowledge-maker, and an imaginary, and a home. Russian and European (colonial) imaginaries constructed the lands and communities of the steppe(s) as the Other, through the image of the perceived lack - the lack of trees, the lack of water, the lack of cities (Moon, Sunderland). This constructed lack was instrumentalized to turn the steppe(s) into a terra nullius and a resource for military, industrial, and agricultural projects first of the Russian Empire, later of the Soviet Union, and now of transnational agricultural corporations. While the lands which once were covered with diverse grasslands have been turned into fields of monocrop agriculture, and the old ways of inhabiting the steppes have mostly survived as oral and written stories, the colonial tropes of imagining the steppes persist. In this panel, thinking with (his)stories of lands today known as Qazaqstan and Ukraine and engaging with our respective fields of sociology, education, history, and cultural studies, we question: 1) Are there ways to narrate and think (spatially, epistemologically, historically, sociologically) with the steppes without perpetuating colonial frameworks? 2) What knowledges, methods, and (hi)stories do the steppes hold? 3) How can we engage the plurality of the steppe (hi)stories, experiences and multispecies socialites which remain on the margins of dominant imaginaries of the steppe regions? 4) What challenges and erasures do we encounter in our research with the steppes, and how can we address them?

Sub Unit

• Anthropology, Cultural Studies

Chair

• Gail Bratcher, U of Chicago

Papers

• From the Frontier to the Frontline: Colonial Imaginaries and the Steppes of Ukraine - Darya Tsymbalyuk, U of Chicago

• The Multiple Afterlives of Scientific Research on the Kazakh Steppe - Gail Bratcher, U of Chicago

• Steppe as Multiverse: Decoloniality, Beyotarlyq, and Borderless-ness in Rethinking the Post-Soviet - Diana T. Kudaibergen, U College London (UK)

• Imagining, Resisting, and Grieving with the Steppe in Satimzhan Sanbayev's 'White Aruana' - Olga Mun, U of Oxford (UK); Svetlana Ananyeva, Inst of Literature and Art (Kazakhstan)

Discussant

• Aizada Arystanbek, Rutgers, The State U of New Jersey