Date:
Location:
Please note the change in location.
"Failed Sociotechnical Imaginaries: Chechnya as the 'Second Kuwait'"
Speaker:
Olga Breininger, PhD Candidate, Department of Slavic Languages & Literatures, Harvard University.
Co-sponsored by the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University.
Contact:
Kasper Schiølin
kasper_schiolin@hks.harvard.edu
Chair:
Sheila Jasanoff, Faculty Associate. Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies, Harvard Kennedy School.
Lunch is provided if you RSVP via our online form by Thursday, October 25th
Abstract:
In his resonant inaugural speech (1991), Dzhokhar Dudaev, the first president of the breakaway state of Ichkeria (formally the Chechen Republic), declared his intention to turn the newly proclaimed state into a “second Kuwait”. Since oil has long been an object of arduous rivalry between Chechnya and Russia, at the height of secessionist moods, the promotion of an oil-based sociotechnical imaginary had an immense nation-building potential. It framed the making of the new Chechen identity as an anti-colonial techno-scientific venture, and a joint innovational experiment between politics and technology. Dudaev’s promise never came true – and paradoxically, the very resource that triggered Chechnya’s claim to sovereignty, failed its nation-building project. This talk will explore the mechanics whereby the pursuit of oil wealth and progress cast an emerging state into destruction, and led to the situation of “incomplete co-production”: creating a society with ambitious political demands yet incapable of providing the material and intellectual resources to fulfil those ambitions.
Biography:
Olga Breininger holds degrees from Gorky Literary Institute (Russia) and the University of Oxford (UK), and is currently working on her dissertation entitled By Sword and Word: Literature, Violence and Religion in the North Caucasus. Olga is also a writer. Her debut novel,There Was No Adderall in the Soviet Union (2017) became a bestseller in Russia, appeared in the long- and short lists of major national literary awards, and earned her the reputation of “the voice of the generation” (Gritsaenko) and “the hope of Russian literature” (Yuzefovich). Written as a first-person female narrative, the novel explores the thin line separating unbounded freedom and global loneliness, the striving for knowledge and the desire for destruction, and seeks to re-define identity and belonging in transnational space.
