| Project Detail |
Unearthing the connection between climate science and colonial violence
Climate science and colonial violence intersect in the shadows of history. While much has been uncovered about climate science during the late European empires of the 19th and 20th centuries, we know far too little about the knowledge born from earlier conquests and Indigenous land appropriation. With the support of the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions programme, the AnthroFront project will study the climate science developed on the Russian Empire’s Siberian and central Asian frontiers in the early 19th century. The aim of this endeavour is to delve into the past in order to provide historical context for present-day policy debates and an innovative model for teaching climate history in public schools.
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. |
