CFP: Energy/Waste: Approaches to the Environment in Post-Soviet Cultures

 Deadline: March 15, 2021

Book Proposal

Energy/Waste: Approaches to the Environment in Post-Soviet Cultures

Edited by Irina Anisimova, Maria Hristova, and Alyssa DeBlasio

Energy and waste can each be conceptualized as an inverse property of the other. If energy provides the ability to perform work—to cause change and generate heat, light, and motion—then waste is the unwanted discard of that work. By the same token, waste is an inevitable byproduct of any energy-generating process, and even renewable energy results in significant waste that must be managed. The interdependency and fragility of the energy/waste relationship is perhaps best captured in the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, when a single nuclear power plant, the source of about 10% of Ukraine’s energy at the time of meltdown, would change the lives of millions of people across multiple geopolitical borders and render 1,000 square miles uninhabitable for the next 20,000 years. The explosion exposed the deficiencies of Soviet technology and the inefficiency of the political system, contributing to an awakening of environmental popular consciousness, as well as the country’s eventual collapse.

 

Despite the Chernobyl tragedy and what it eventually revealed about the larger Soviet tendency of mismanaging the energy production process, not much has fundamentally changed in how post-Soviet Russia exploits and benefits from its natural resources. According to 2020 data from the International Energy Agency, Russia is the world’s largest exporter of gas and the second largest of oil. It ranks fourth in the world (after China, the U.S., and India) in energy consumption, production of electricity, and carbon dioxide emissions from oil, gas, and coal consumption. Likewise, World Bank data reports that each year Russia produces 55-60 million tons of municipal solid waste, of which only 5-7% is recycled or repurposed. Rising targets for renewable energy and waste management solutions across Europe pose a significant threat to Russia’s reliance on hydrocarbon revenues, thereby challenging the traditional paradigm of energy/waste at play in Russia and raising environmental awareness and activism. While Russia remains one of the most prominent producers and exporters of energy resources, the various post-Soviet states have each followed their own course: e.g., Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia are among the EU member states to have already met, or are close to hitting, their 2020 renewable energy targets, while Central Asian states advertise willingness to support renewable energy resource development as a means to attract foreign investors without making and enforcing concrete changes to their energy/waste structures. 

 

While significant research has been undertaken on the economics and institutional framework of the post-Soviet energy sector and pollution regulation, there has not yet been a synthesis of the visualization and representation of the energy/waste connection in contemporary post-Soviet cultures. Since the early 1960s, the concept of sustainable development has emerged as a critical issue in most contemporary Western societies, leading to the rise of ecological and environmental criticism in the humanities and social sciences. These discussions intensified in the 1990s, when global warming became an international concern and environmental disasters gained global media attention, coinciding with the dissolution of the Soviet Union. However, much of the environmental public discourse and academic debates in Western societies remain unacknowledged in Russophone cultural production. Scholars have undertaken quantitative or historical studies of Russia as a petrostate, its energy sector, and the mounting challenges it faces with waste management. But no comprehensive study to date has investigated the relationship of energy and waste in the cultural sphere, nor the way that these categories are made visible for average citizens through discourse, literature, film, art, and other modes of production. If scholars in Western Europe and North America, such as Felix Guattari, Nancy Tuana, and Stacy Alaimo, theorize new interdisciplinary paradigms of thinking about the interconnection between humans and the environment, only a few thinkers in Russia, such as Vladimiar Kagansky, attempt to do something similar for the post-Soviet world. 

 

This volume addresses questions of energy and waste, in their inverse relationship, as well as in their connectivity, as a way to better understand how post-Soviet societies reinterpret and reimagin not only their own role in energy use and waste management, but also their relationship to the Soviet legacy of large-scale environmental changes, pollution, and resource exploitation. The visualisation and conceptualization of energy/waste, thus, becomes a convenient tool for national identity building, whether in concert or in opposition to the shared Soviet past. 

 

The papers in this volume will attempt to answer a number of questions: how is pollution/waste represented in contemporary post-Soviet society and culture? What kinds of sustainability solutions or activism can be found in post-Soviet countries? How does culture make waste visible through art and social critique? How does recycling of waste figure in modern art? How are energy, its consumption and production represented in contemporary post-Soviet culture, such as literature, film, and performative/fine arts? Does post-Soviet context make this representation different as compared to Soviet and global trends? Are there any activist movements surrounding sustainable energy use? How are Soviet environmental disasters, such as the Chernobyl explosion and nuclear tests, perceived and represented in different post-Soviet countries? Among our goals is the task of analyzing and conceptualizing the impact of the shared Soviet past on environmental representation today, while also recognizing the distinctive trajectories that each country has taken in its own development on energy/waste issues in the past three decades. 

Project Timeline

March 15, 2021: title, abstracts, and author bio due to Alyssa DeBlasio, deblasia@dickinson.edu 

September 30, 2021: drafts due for editors’ feedback

January 15, 2022: full submissions due for peer review process