Anthropocene Frontiers: Colonial Climate Science in Siberia and Central Asia

Descrizione del progetto

Scoprire il legame tra climatologia e violenza coloniale

La climatologia e la violenza coloniale sono elementi che si intersecano nei meandri della storia. Mentre è stato svelato molto sulle conoscenze in materia di climatologia esistenti durante gli ultimi imperi europei nel XIX e XX secolo, sappiamo troppo poco su quelle originate dalle conquiste precedenti e dall’appropriazione delle terre degli indigeni. Con il sostegno del programma di azioni Marie Skłodowska-Curie, il progetto AnthroFront studierà la climatologia sviluppata sulle frontiere della Siberia e dell’Asia centrale dell’Impero russo all’inizio del XIX secolo, scavando nel passato con l’obiettivo di fornire un contesto storico ai dibattiti politici attuali e un modello innovativo per l’insegnamento della storia del clima nelle scuole pubbliche.

Obiettivo

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.