Tanya Richardson is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Global Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University. Her research has analyzed the processes through which places and landscapes on Ukraine’s Black Sea Coast acquire identities and material forms in relation to changing state boundaries, political economic relations, and geopolitics in Europe. Her doctoral research about Ukraine’s Black Sea port of Odessa was based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2001- 2002, and showed how residents’ engagements with the city’s histories, texts and pre-revolutionary architecture challenged some of Ukraine’s nationalizing narratives by positioning the city as a cosmopolitan “place apart.” Using the metaphor of kaleidoscope, she traced the ways in which engagements with history, myth and literature in museums, schools, walking groups and markets conjured the city as part of divergent and overlapping cultural geographies of nation and empire.

Since 2008 she has examined the ecological and material politics of place-making in a Ukrainian-Romanian Transboundary Biosphere Reserve in Ukraine’s Danube Delta. She has published a series of articles about the impact of new environmental projects on human and more-than-human landscapes. These include the role of the politics of scientific expertise and the material capacities of irrigation infrastructure in preventing activists from restoring a lagoon ecosystem; how understandings of politics and the political in nonliberal places challenge the adoption of participatory environmental management approaches premised on liberalism; and the ways in which socialist modernization and postsocialist deindustrialization have terrestrialized townspeople’s livelihoods and accelerated the siltation of canals in the Danube Delta town of Vylkove known as “the Ukrainian Venice.” Her current research is focused on apiculture and the development of apicultural science in Ukraine.

Education

Ph.D University of Cambridge (2005)
MPhil. University of Cambridge (2000)
B.A. University of British Columbia (1995)

Research Interests

Space, place and landscape
Natural resources and understandings of “nature”
Human-nonhuman relations
Apiculture

Recent Publications

2018    “The Terrestrialization of Amphibious Life in a Danube Delta ‘Town on Water’” Suomen Antropologi 43(2):3-29.

2018    “Managing Ambiguous Amphibians: Feral Cows, People, and Place in Ukraine’s Danube Delta,” Canadian Slavonic Papers 60 (3-4): 7-32.

2016    “Where the Water Sheds: Disputed Deposits at the Ends of the Danube,” in Marijeta Bozovic and Matthew Miller (eds.) Watersheds: The Poetics and Politics of the Danube River. Academic Studies Press: Boston, Pp. 307-336.

2016    “Objecting (to) Infrastructure: Ecopolitics at the Ukrainian Ends of the Danube,” Science as Culture 25(1): 69-95.

2016  “The Politics of Multiplication in a Failed Soviet Irrigation Project, Or, How Sasyk Has Been Kept From the Sea,” Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology 81(1): 125-151.

2015   “On the Limits of Liberalism in Participatory Environmental Governance: Conflict and  Conservation in Ukraine’s Danube Delta,” Development and Change 46(3): 415-441.

2015  “(In)Accessible Land: The Changing Practices and Regulation of Gardening in the     Reedbeds of Ukraine’s Danube Delta,” in Kristof van Assche and Constantin Iordachi

(eds.) The Danube Delta: Nature, History, Policies. Eds.. Lexington Books: Lanham. Pp. 197-222.

2008    Kaleidoscopic Odessa: History and Place in Contemporary Ukraine. University of Toronto Press: Toronto.