RG 5856/1: Water Energies structuring space: Between Soviet Modernity, nation-building and global ecologies (SP B3)

The project—a subproject of the Research Network “Energies of Interconnection: Actors, Spaces, and Narratives in Eastern Europe” (FU)—examines the transformation of spaces shaped by hydropower, the transformation of rivers as a “flow of energy” (Tvedt/Jakobsson 2006) between Soviet imperial-multinational modernity and renationalization in the late Soviet republics and the independent states in the decades following 1991, for which one can speak
of a “Soviet water legacy” (Murzakulova 2023). In doing so, a comparative analysis focuses on two river regions—the Dnipro/Dnepr in Ukraine and the Naryn and Syr Darya in Central Asia.
The project’s primary starting point is the Blue Humanities approach (Mentz 2024, Oppermann 2023, Boccaletti 2021) as a water-focused subfield of the Energy Humanities (I. Szeman/D. Boyer 2017), which, unlike the somewhat older Environmental Humanities, explicitly place (environmental) political engagement on their agenda alongside scientific analysis and understand their research in activist terms. This project attempts to move beyond the human position of power inherent in the Anthropocene by not only tracing the history of modernity’s strategies of domination, but also by elucidating the agency of rivers and waters that resists these strategies and defies all attempts at transformation and erasure.