[Sci-tech-public] MIT Seminar on Environmental and Agricultural History : Feb 2, 2024

[Kathleen Lopes]

Seminar on Environmental and Agricultural History 
February 2 & February 9, 2024
2:30-4:00 PM
Hybrid Event
MIT Campus, E51-095





February 2, 2024:  “Locusts of Power: Borders, Empire, and Environment in the Modern Middle East”
Samuel Dolbee , Vanderbilt University
Hybrid Event, register here  <https://mit.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJMvcuCsrTgiH90Af8Gm7Gn8p6fJA3V6Dc0v#/registration>

In this highly original environmental history, Samuel Dolbee sheds new light on borders and state formation by following locusts and revealing how they shaped both the environment and people's imaginations from the late Ottoman Empire to the Second World War. Drawing on a wide range of archival research in multiple languages, Dolbee details environmental, political, and spatial transformations in the region's history by tracing the movements of locusts and their intimate relationship to people in motion, including Arab and Kurdish nomads, Armenian deportees, and Assyrian refugees, as well as states of theregion. With locusts and moving people at center stage,surprising continuities and ruptures appear in the Jazira, the borderlands of today's Iraq, Syria, and Turkey. Transcending approaches focused on the collapse of the Ottoman Empire or the creation of nation states, Dolbee provides a new perspective on the modern Middle East grounded in environmental change, state violence, and popular resistance.


February 9, 2024: "Indigenous turn and environmentalism in the last decades of the USS: rethinking colonial amnesia”
Linda Kaljundi
Estonian Academy of Arts / Fulbright Visting Professor at MIT
Hybrid Event, register here <https://mit.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJEscO2grTwtH9cDlJUYADkVha4BmVylORq0#/registration>

The 1970s and 1980s witnessed a boom of interest in indigenous peoples living in the territories of the erstwhile Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. This rediscovery of the indigenous took various forms ranging from expeditions and (artistic) research to various forms of cultural representation. In analyzing the practices and works of late Soviet Estonian writers, filmmakers, artists, conservationists, etc., I will focus on two sets of questions. On the one hand, why did they take such a serious, scientific interest in the indigenous people, and why did their works have such a great appeal to a wider audience? On the other hand, what was left unsaid? How much did these more privileged authors reflect on the environmental problems faced by indigenous communities? How did their projects relate to the legacies of Russian colonial expansion? Today, when the invisibility of Russian colonial history has become particularly acute, the borderlands of the former empire offer perspectives for thinking through the roots of this colonial amnesia as well as the strategies of unlearning. 





For more information please visit : https://history.mit.edu/lectures-and-seminars/seminar-on-environmental-and-agricultural-history-seah/


Kathleen Lopes 
Administrative Assistant III
MIT History Section 

 
Schedule
On-site: Tuesday, and Thursday 
Remote: Monday, Wednesday and Friday


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