The steppe has often been seen as a background against which (hi)stories of the land forming today’s Qazaqstan have been narrated. How does our understanding of these (hi)stories change when instead, the steppe comes to the fore? The steppes of Qazaqstan have undergone profound terraforming through forced collectivization, the Virgin Lands campaign, and monocrop agriculture. At the same time, local knowledge of engaging with the steppes has often been lost with the death and displacement of local steppe inhabitants, disruption of intergenerational knowledge transfer (often in the form of oral tradition), and coloniality of Russian and Soviet epistemologies. In this discussion, Gail Bratcher (PhD candidate in History, University of Chicago) and Olga Mun (PhD candidate in Education, University of Oxford) reflect on the ways in which environmental approaches shape their research into the (hi)stories of the steppe, and examine what narratives can be told when we pay close attention to the lives of soil, animals, and plants, and the knowledge contained in the ecosystems of the steppe.
If you cannot attend in person, you can watch this discussion on Zoom. Register here.
Gail Bratcher is a Ph.D. Candidate in History at the University of Chicago. Their dissertation is entitled “The ‘Second’ Virgin Lands Campaign: Ecological Imperialism and Livestock-Agriculture on the Steppe, 1891-1980.” It uses the tools of environmental history and the history of science and technology to explore the nature of Russian and Soviet imperialism in Qazaqstan through the lens of cattle raising.
Taugul born, and London based Olga Mun is a co-convenor of the Climate Change Education Reading Group at the Department of Education at the University of Oxford. Olga’s main research interest is in the topics of epistemic injustice across all levels of education and the reparative ways to address them. Her doctoral project at Oxford University is looking at environmental education in Central Asian and global higher education with a focus on what glaciers and steppe tulips can teach about climate change and sustainability. Prior to joining Oxford, Olga taught at University College London Institute of Education in London on the topics of migrant, refugee and minority education and European education traditions from a comparative lens.
Darya Tsymbalyuk is an interdisciplinary researcher, and her practice includes writing and image-making. Most of Darya’s work lies at the intersection of environmental humanities and artistic research. Darya is the author of the book Ecocide in Ukraine: the Environmental Cost of Russia’s War (Polity Press 2025), as well as Limits of Collaboration: Art, Ethics, and Donbas , co-written with Victoria Donovan in collaboration with artists and curators Dmytro Chepurnyi, Viktor “Corwic” Zasypkin, Oleksandr Kuchynskyi, and Kateryna Siryk (Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung Ukraine, 2022). Among her many shorter publications is a double special issue on the environmental humanities of Ukraine co-edited with Tanya Richardson and forthcoming with East/West: Journal of Ukrainian Studies . In addition to writing, Darya also works with images through drawing, painting, collage, and film essays. Darya serves as an Assistant Professor at the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Chicago. You can learn more about her work here: http://daryatsymbalyuk.com/