The Politics of Nuclear Cultural Heritage in Sarov, Russia's nuclear city: Layering the Past

In this talk I explore nuclear cultural heritage-making as a spatial activity in the context of nuclear secrecy and restricted access focusing on the closed city Sarov, formerly Arzamas-16, the birthplace of Soviet nuclear weapons. Based on interviews, fieldwork in Russia, and online ethnography, this paper maps the hitherto unstudied development of cultural heritage infrastructure in a closed city and its diverse and at times conflicting political uses.

About the speaker

Dr Eglė Rindzevičiūtė is Associate Professor of Criminology and Sociology at Kingston University. She joined the Department of Criminology and Social Sciences in September 2015 from Sciences Po, the Paris Institute of Political Studies. Following her PhD she taught and did research at the University of Gothenburg and the University of Linköping in Sweden as well as Sciences Po, France. In addition to this, she was a Visiting Scholar at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, the University of Cambridge, the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI), Bremen University, the Humboldt University of Berlin and Gothenburg University.