Makar Tereshin

Supervisors: Dr Michal Murawski and Prof Victor Buchli

Present status: PhD candidate

Working title of thesis: Falling Back to Earth: Politics and Ecology of the Baikonur Cosmodrome

Description: Following the key infrastructural nodes of the Russian space industry in Kazakhstan, my work examines communities, ecologies and economies that form in and around the Baikonur Cosmodrome. Interrogating the politics and ecology of Baikonur, I investigate how the space industry mediates different ethical and political projects at different scales: advancing space exploration, subjecting communities to systematic inequality and environmental injustice, and providing a livelihood. Bringing the focus of space exploration back down to Earth, this project addresses the need for ethnographic specification, politicisation, and historicisation of the networks related to the support of human presence in Low Earth Orbit and emphasises specific “topographies of power” (Ferguson, 2006) that bring into view the uneven character of political and economic connections behind the work of the Russian space industry.

Research interests: Social studies of outer space, environmental anthropology, space infrastructures, space debris, Russia, Kazakhstan.

Research Centre Affiliation: FRINGE