The keynote address by Prof. Amanda Wooden

September 13, 2016

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

You are invited to attend the keynote address by Prof. Amanda Wooden delivered on the occasion of opening of the Fifth Annual Conference of Central Asian Studies Institute on September 16, at 10:00, room 410.

Thinking about Nature/s, Glaciers, Tropes, and the Everyday:
Reading the Politics of Contestation in Kyrgyzstan

Amanda E. Wooden
Associate Professor of Environmental Studies
Bucknell University

This talk explores the ways scholars writing about Central Asia and elsewhere are thinking about nature as plural, complex, and social. In order to understand these relationships more, Prof. Wooden will look at cases primarily in Kyrgyzstan and focus on popular discourses, with some reference to other situations and events elsewhere in Central Asia and North America. Specifically, Prof. Wooden will explore changing meanings of glaciers in Kyrgyzstan and related meaning making of nations and patriotism. She will dissect tropes and labels some journalists, government officials, industry representatives, and activists use about each other. Neither these narratives nor the socio-environments are static.

Thus Prof. Wooden will investigate changing perceptions and narratives used by these same actors, what we might call learning and adaptation processes, and overall dynamism of environmental politics and meanings of nature in Kyrgyzstan. In addition, she will discuss how studies of everyday experiences in Central Asia and the average community member’s daily relationships with and within nature/s, reveal not only what life is like, but also provide insight into what issues become recognized as political at the national level.

In addition to traditional sites of contestation, such as street protests or formal parliamentary disputes, much can be revealed about social understandings of nature, environmental concerns, emotional attachments to community and nation, by investigating places where we might expect social mobilization and it seems absent. This warrants attention to non-protests, to silence, to every day and quiet resistances. Amanda E. Wooden is an Associate Professor and Director of the Environmental Studies Program, at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania and the 2015-2020 David and Patricia Ekedahl Professor in Environmental Studies.

In 2001, she was a visiting faculty member in the ICP department at American University of Central Asia (AUCA). She is a transdisciplinary, critical political scientist with an MA in International Studies and PhD in International Relations and Public (Environmental) Policy from Claremont Graduate University, and a BA in Russian and Political Science from Syracuse University. Her research explores environmental policy and water politics, protests, extractive industries, and narratives about environmentalism, waterways, nature/s and nationalism, and climate change. Along with a co-edited volume and various book chapters, she has published articles in journals such as Political Geography, Post-Soviet Affairs, Central Asian Survey, and PS: Political Science & Politics. Professor Wooden’s long-term field work, most recent and forthcoming publications are about

Along with a co-edited volume and various book chapters, she has published articles in journals such as Political Geography, Post-Soviet Affairs, Central Asian Survey, and PS: Political Science & Politics. Professor Wooden’s long-term field work, most recent and forthcoming publications are about environmental concern and protests, gold mining, glaciers, and hydroenergy disputes in Kyrgyzstan and hydrofracking and fracktivism in Pennsylvania, US. Professor Wooden created and edited TheCESSBlog as a member of the Central Eurasian Studies Society (CESS) executive board and will be the next president of CESS, 2017-2018.

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