On February 5, at 7 pm Tbilisi time, the biweekly research colloquium of the Institute for Social and Cultural Research, Ilia State University, will host Prof. Jennifer Keating, Antoni Porayski-Pomsta and Sohee Ryuk with a talk on their research: “Reimagining rural worlds: Connected materialities of environmental change in the late Russian empire”.
Abstract:
This paper offers an overview of the Land Limits project and collective attempts of the authors to explore connected histories of population, environmental change, capital and conflict in Russian Eurasia between the 1860s and the early 1920s. This period, marked by overlapping processes of colonisation, industrialisation, modernisation and political collapse, witnessed wide-ranging ecological transformations across the rural spaces of the multi-ethnic Russian empire: authors prioritise fine-grained, place-specific research in order to understand and emphasise the materiality of these shifting human-nature relations. At the same time, recognising that ecological change can reshape socio-economic relations, the project is equally interested in tracing how new forms of adaption, cooperation, inequality and conflict emerged through new relationships with the land.
Co-presented by three members of the research team, discussions highlight current work-in-progress on ecosystem disruptions in the uplands of Central Asia, forests and the lumber trade in Russian Poland, and crop commodification in the Transcaucasus. Beyond these individual case studies, the authors briefly consider their various entanglements, asking what can be gained by putting these environments and communities into multiscalar conversations about empire-wide economic growth, political disintegration, and the planetary Anthropocene.
Bios:
Jennifer Keating is Associate Professor of History at University College Dublin, Ireland, and is a historian of empire and environment, with particular interests in Central and Inner Asia. Her first monograph, On arid ground: Political ecologies of empire in Russian Central Asia was published in 2022, and won the Royal Historical Society Gladstone Prize for the best debut book in European or World History. More recently, her research has focused on ecologies of pastoralism; trade networks; slow violence and ecosystem disruptions in eastern Central Asia during the late nineteenth/early twentieth century. She is currently the PI of the ERC-funded project ‘Land Limits: Towards a connected history of population, environment, capital and conflict in Russian Eurasia, 1860s-1920s’.
Antoni Porayski-Pomsta is a European Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow at University College Dublin specialising in the history of Poland and the Russian empire. His current project explores a connected history of peripheral Russian Poland with a particular focus on forests, lumber trade and common land in the aftermath of Jewish emancipation and rural reform. Antoni is also finishing his first monograph building on his doctoral dissertation from the University of Cambridge that will explore the history of industrial suburbs in the so-called Vistula Land. The book is tentatively entitled: At the Gates of Modernity: A History of Russian Poland’s Urban Outskirts. His recent work can be found in Kritika and Journal of Social History.
Sohee Ryuk is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow for the European Research Council project “Land Limits: Towards a connected history of population, environmental change, capital and conflict in Russian Eurasia, 1860s-1920s.” Her research, “Village Encounters in Kutaisi Governorate,” explores how rural areas in the Transcaucasus were integrated into global markets. In particular, she is interested in tracing how increasingly commodified crops such as grapes and corn impacted land use by small-scale rural producers.
The event will take place in English via Zoom. Registration is required.
To register please follow this link.
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