Workshop program, Ecologies of Health and Disease in Eurasia: New Perspectives in the Medical-Environmental Humanities and History

The University of Oslo is pleased to host a workshop, "Ecologies of Health and Disease in Eurasia: New Perspectives in the Medical-Environmental Humanities and History," June 1-2, 2023. 

Please find the workshop program below. 

ECOLOGIES OF HEALTH AND DISEASE IN EURASIA: 
NEW PERSPECTIVES IN THE MEDICAL-ENVIRONMENTAL HUMANITIES AND HISTORY

WORKSHOP PROGRAM

THURSDAY, 1 JUNE 2023 

THE BODIES OF HUMANS & OTHER ANIMALS 
9:00-10:15
Chair: David Roger Bannister (University of Oslo) 

Claire Shaw (Warwick University): “Conceptualizing the ‘Useful Body’ in the USSR: Labour Capacity, Disability and the Influence of Environments” 

Anna Toropova (University of Copenhagen): “Constitution or Environment? Iurii Kannabikh, Shattered Nerves and the Psychoneuroses of Revolution”

Iryna Skubii (Queens University): “Animals, Diseases, and More-Than-Human Dimensions of Famines in Soviet Ukraine” 

MULTISPECIES HEALTH AND DISEASE 
10:30-11:45
Chair: Mingyuan Zhang (University of Oslo)

Anna Mazanik (German Historical Institute, Moscow): “Ticks, Humans, and the Soviet Project: Exploring the Environmental History of Tick-Borne Encephalitis in Eurasia” 

Julia Malitska (Södertörn University): “Nutritional controversies in the fin de siècle Russian Empire: People’s Health, Dietary Reform and the ‘Meat Question’”

Susanne Bauer (University of Oslo): “Fallout and food webs from the ground up: multispecies legacies of nuclear testing in Kazakhstan” 

DISEASE ECOLOGIES 
11:45-1:15
Chair: Nhung Lu (University of Oslo) 

Einar Wigen and Ingrid Eskild (University of Oslo): “Plague’s Concepts of Europe” 

Susan Jones (University Minnesota): “Donors and Recipients: Soviet Scientists’ Conceptualization of a Disease Reservoir on the Steppes, 1930s-1960s”  

Clemens Günther (Freie University): “The Infectious Periphery: Pandemics and the (Post)Colonial Question in the Russian Empire” 

Marek Eby (New York University): “Landscapes and Lifeways of Socialism: Malaria Ecologies of Soviet Kyrgyzstan, 1925-1939”

MICROBIAL ENTANGLEMENTS
1:45-3:00
Chair: Ayse Nalan Azak (University of Oslo)

Dmitriy Myelnikov (Cambridge University): “‘The unbreakable bond between the organism and the environment’: Bacteriophage therapy as an ecological pursuit in Soviet Georgia” 

Miriam F. Lipton (Oregon State University): “Better Together? Soviet Combination Antibiotic Therapy with Bacteriophages in the 1950s and 1960s” 

Serina Tarkhanian (The Oslo School of Architecture
and Design) and Corinne Aivazian (Terra Ancestral): “Healing Earths: Exploring remedial entanglements and materiality of Armenian clay” 

KEYNOTE
3:15-4:45
Chair: Johanna Conterio (University of Oslo)

Kate Brown (MIT): “Communist Bodies and Capitalist Bodies: What Radiation Medicine Tells us about Cold War Understandings of Ecological Health” 

THE HUMAN MIND IN TIME, SPACE, AND ENVIRONMENT 
5:00-6:15 
Chair: Leonoor Zuiderveen Borgesius (University of Oslo)

Chechesh Kudachinova (Mannheim University): “Siberian Hysteria, Environment, and Colonialism: Exploring the Frontier of Mental Disorders in Northeast Eurasia, 1880s-1920s”

Matthew P. Romaniello (Weber State University): “The Question of Russia’s ‘Mixed’ Peoples: Linnaeus, the Academy of Sciences, and the Eighteenth-Century Taxonomic Project” 

Ana Hedberg Olenina (Arizona State University): “Resonant Space: Kinesthesia and Immersive Experience in Sonorous Media Environments of Sergei Eisenstein and Lev Theremin” 
 

FRIDAY, 2 JUNE 2023 

URBAN PLANNING, ARCHITECTURE, AND HEALTH 
9:00-10:15
Chair: Nikhil Malik (University of Oslo)

Maria C. Taylor (Princeton University): “Plants at Plants: the Phyto-Mitigation of Industrial Hazards in Stalin-era Urbanism” 

Zeynep Ece Sahin Korkan (Technical University of Munich): “Healing Landscapes: Women, Ecology, and Healthcare in fin de siècle Istanbul” 

Anna Batzeli (Aristotle University): “Insufficient Water Supply Management and Typhoid Fever Outbreaks: a case-study from interwar Andros, Greece” 

MIGRATION, MOBILITY, HEALTH, AND ENVIRONMENT 
10:30-11:45 
Chair: Ingrid Eskild (University of Oslo)

Elena Vishlenkova (Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies): “’Siberian health’ and ‘Caucasian longevity’: Soviet Bioregionalism in the 1970s-1990s” 

Jo Laycock (University Manchester): “Refuge in an ‘Inhospitable Land’: Resettlement, Health and the Transformation of the Soviet Armenian Environment” 

Ilona Kappanyos (Eötvös Loránd University, Hungary): “Local Expertise: The Role of Hungarian Visiting Nurses in Locations and Accessing Patients” 

DISCIPLINARY KNOWLEDGE 
12:15-1:30
Chair: Astrid Schrader (University of Exeter)

Marin Coudreau (CERCEC, CNRS, Paris) & Laurent Coumel (CREE, INALCO, Paris): “‘Geohygiene’: A Soviet Precursor for a Science of ‘Global Health?’” 
 
Sergei Mokhov (Liverpool John Moores University): “Soviet oncology in a trap of infrastructure” 

George Andrei (Indiana University, Bloomington): “A Wild Country: Miasmas, Climate, and Health and the Emergence of Forestry in Romania, 1886-1910” 

TOXIC LANDSCAPES
2:00-3:30
Chair: Johannes Mattes (University of Oslo)

Marc Elie, CNRS (France): “Did the Soviet Union Collapse under an Environmental Health Crisis? Revisiting the Ecocide Thesis Thirty Years after”

Sarah Cameron (University of Maryland): “The Aral Syndrome: Health, Environment and the Retreat of Central Asia’s Aral Sea” 

Tsz Ho Wong (University of Edinburgh): “Japan’s Pre-War Research on Chemical Warfare and Wartime Production of Related Weapons and Equipment”

Nicholas Breyfogle (Ohio State University): “Contaminated Waters: Debating the Meanings of Pollution at Lake Baikal” 

HEALING LANDSCAPES
3:30-4:45
Chair: Subhadeep Chowdhury (University of Oslo)

Temirlan Tileubek (University California, Davis): “Making New Soviet Children: Evgenii Radin and The Transformation of Childhood in Revolutionary Russia” 

Slava Savova (Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Studies with Ethnographic Museum): “Atlas of Health: Hydrogeological Cartography and the Weaving of Healthscapes in Postwar Bulgaria” 

Emma Friedlander (Harvard University): “Health and healing in the late Soviet ‘New Age’”

Supported by the Oslo School of Environmental Humanities, UiO: Life Sciences, and KLIMER: Interdisciplinær forskergruppe for klima, miljø, og energi.

Please find more information here. 

Conference convener:
Dr Johanna Conterio
Associate Professor of Environmental History 
University of Oslo
Department of Archaeology, Conservation and History 
PB 1008, Blindern, NO-0315 Oslo, Norway
Johanna.Conterio@iakh.uio.no