CfP: Cold War and Environmental Sciences
Workshop: Cold War and Environmental Sciences: Circulations, exchanges
and cooperation between the USSR and the West, 1950s-1990s
Venue: Royal Geographical Society, 1 Kensington Gore, Kensington, London SW7 2AR
Date: 18 December 2018
International scientific collaboration during the Cold War has attracted
increased attention during the last decade not least for its ability to
further insight into the evident contradictory trends of knowledge
production and secrecy, cooperation and conflict. At the same time, much
of the analysis has been on research activities in Western settings, or
else from a Western perspective.
Inspired in part by the 1972 US-USSR Agreement on Cooperation in the
Field of Environmental Protection, this workshop seeks to explore the
specifics of collaboration between the East and the West in the broad
area of the environmental sciences moving beyond the high-level
political discussions between superpowers in order to explore the
perspectives of intergovernmental initiatives, sub-national scientific
groupings, as well as individual scientists from both sides of the
ideological divide. Underlining the contradictions noted above, many of
those sciences proving effective in the advancement of international
scientific cooperation were simultaneously of great applied significance
for military and defence-related activities. The following questions
are at the centre of our interest and focus:
• How was East-West collaboration aimed at increasing our
understanding of issues such as climate change, seismology, or pollution
and its impact on health, conceived, promoted and advanced by the two
sides of the ideological divide?
• Linked to this, how effective were expansive international
agendas such as sustainable development in binding together the
activities of both East and West?
• How balanced were these collaborations, and what economic,
geopolitical or national security concerns impacted the production of
this specific knowledge?
• To what extent did intellectual and scientific exchange occur outside of largescale international initiatives?
• What happened to the knowledge that was gained within the
cooperation/collaborative initiatives? And, to what extent did it find
its place in policies or institutional agendas on either side of the
Iron Curtain?
• How was scientific collaboration able to function during times
of heightened geopolitical uncertainty and defence-related secrecy?
• What processes of historical change can we detect in the way
these scientific collaborations between the East and the West developed
over the decades leading to the end of the Cold War?
We welcome contributions from all disciplinary areas and are
particularly interested in papers based on archival research and/or
interview material and data. Please send your abstract (max. 500 words)
for a 20-minute presentation and a short biographical overview (max. 100
words) to Katja Doose at: k.doose@bham.ac.uk no later than August 15, 2018.
We have funds available to cover travel and accommodation for a limited
number of participants. Please indicate in your email if you are
interested in being considered for these funds.
The workshop is funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council
and forms part of the AHRC- funded project ‘Soviet climate science and
its intellectual legacies’ (AH/P004431/1), https://sovietclimatechange.