Speaker
Description
The research studies the railway net as a postcolonial agent in terms of reshaping the Central Asian space. The author questioned whether the railways still have the colonial or imperial agenda, or it was reimagined by the national states after 1991 and now the Central Asian railways are bearers of a new agenda. To analyse the changes in railways as the instrument of shaping the territories, the old Soviet infrastructure patterns were compared to the new ones in the main Central Asian cities. Comparing the people’s mobility within new patterns to the old ones the study shows differences in space usage and the knowledge production of the territories by changes in people’s movement. The comparison was made by studying old city plans in a spatial turn sense and observation of mobility patterns in modern history. Based on the analysis, the argument consists of reimagining railways as a national inheritance rather than a colonial legacy into the symbolic space of national regimes because the railway as a symbol of modernisation remains worldwide. Being divided by national borders despite the previous common czarist or Soviet railways the knowledge production of the territories connected via railroads is made in different ways. New knowledge over the reshaped territories in Central Asia is proved by different mobility patterns, choice of transport and human traffic.
Biography
I am a historian interested in transport and ecological history. My main field was in maritime transport modern history within the optic of human-nature interaction. I wrote my thesis in economic history about the maritime shipping to the Russian ports on the Baltic Sea in the XVIII century. My minor field was in ecological history about the Soviet extraction of underground resources on the permafrost territories. The main topic I’m studying currently is the ways of governing territories out-of-direct reach fiscal-military state’s force.
