Water and the Environment in Central Eurasia: A Workshop in Honor of Julia Obertreis
6.06.2024, Almaty, Kazakhstan


How can we reconstruct the more-than-human history of Central Eurasia? What new insights does this perspective bring to the understanding of the region’s past and present? How can we connect it to the global environmental history? On 6 June 2024 Anna Mazanik (Max Weber Network Eastern Europe), Jeff Sahadeo (Carleton University) and Tamar Qeburia (Ilia State University/University of Göttingen) co-organized a workshop on the humans and the environment in Central Eurasia that brought together an international and interdisciplinary group of scholars working on the region, with participants from Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Georgia, Germany, Czechia, France, Norway, India, Japan, Canada, and the U.S. It was held at the Turan University in Almaty, Kazakhstan as a pre-conference workshop before the annual convention of the Central Eurasian Studies Society. The workshop was dedicated to Julia Obertreis (1969-2023), professor of East European history from the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg, whose pioneering work on the history of water and water infrastructure in Central Asia offered new ways to see the region.
The workshop was structured around three roundtables, followed first by discussions in small groups to allow for more interactive engagement and then by an open discussion. In the first panel, Jeff Sahadeo, Tamar Qeburia and Sarah Cameron (University of Maryland) discussed regional water issues, from aridity to floods, from energy to drinking water, focusing on the Caucasus and Central Asia, in particular, the Aral Sea crisis. In the second panel, devoted to the multispecies histories of Central Eurasia, Anna Mazanik, Aibubi Duisebayeva (Al-Farabi Kazakh National University) and Susan Jones (University of Minnesota) revealed the complex entanglements between humans and animals in the region in the context of nomadism, agriculture, trade, migration, health and disease, and presented various theoretical and methodological approaches to studying non-human agency, from archaeology and biology to multispecies ethnography. The third panel centered on teaching and interdisciplinary research dissemination, with Natalya Ryzhova (University of Olomouc) speaking on the cooperation between economists and environmental historians in the study of soybean production and Elena Kochetkova (University of Bergen) discussing how we can incorporate Central Eurasian history into the courses on global environmental history for students outside of the region.
OpenEdition schlägt Ihnen vor, diesen Beitrag wie folgt zu zitieren:
Natalia Arzamastseva (11. Juni 2024). Water and the Environment in Central Eurasia: A Workshop in Honor of Julia Obertreis. Max Weber Netzwerk Osteuropa. Abgerufen am 11. Februar 2025 von https://mwsosteuropa.hypotheses.org/4767