Anthropocene Frontiers: Colonial Climate Science in Siberia and Central Asia

Descripción del proyecto

Desenterrar la conexión entre la ciencia del clima y la violencia colonial

La ciencia del clima y la violencia colonial se cruzan en las sombras de la historia. Aunque se ha descubierto mucho sobre la ciencia del clima durante los últimos imperios europeos de los siglos XIX y XX, se sabe demasiado poco sobre los conocimientos nacidos de conquistas anteriores y de la apropiación de tierras indígenas. El equipo del proyecto AnthroFront, que cuenta con el apoyo de las Acciones Marie Skłodowska-Curie, estudiará la ciencia del clima desarrollada en las fronteras siberianas y centroasiáticas del Imperio ruso a principios del siglo XIX. El objetivo de este trabajo es ahondar en el pasado para proporcionar un contexto histórico a los debates políticos actuales y un modelo innovador de enseñanza de la historia del clima en las escuelas públicas.

Objetivo

The AnthroFront project analyzes the relationship between climate science and colonial violence from the perspective of the Russian Empire’s Siberian and Central Asian frontiers in the earlier nineteenth century. Scholars have shown how climate science developed on the scale of Europe’s late overseas and land empires in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Far less is known about the knowledge produced by earlier processes of conquest and the expropriation of Indigenous land. This project studies a cohort of Baltic-German scientists dispatched to Russian frontiers to understand how borderland encounters generated knowledge about climate change. The first comprehensive study of colonial climate sciences in the Russian Empire, this project develops a new framework for understanding interdisciplinary and intercultural exchanges of climate knowledge. The project gives historical context to contemporary policy debates and provides a pedagogical model for teaching climate history in public schools. Research integrates German and Estonian archives with digitized sources and focuses on three core themes: (1) the role of instructions in organizing colonial travel, (2) the dynamics of encounter between settler, Indigenous, and expeditionary groups, and (3) the circulation of knowledge from central Europe to Central Asia and back. The project will be carried out over twenty-four months in the Department of History of Science and Ideas at Uppsala University under the supervision of Dr. Linda Andersson Burnett, Senior Researcher in the history of colonial travel and indigeneity. The fellowship is also enriched by collaboration with Dr. Jennifer Keating at University College Dublin, a leading environmental historian of Imperial Russia. While advancing the MSCA Green Charter through public outreach, the project will produce two research articles and a special journal issue based on an interdisciplinary conference, laying the groundwork for a subsequent monograph.