Makar Tereshin (UCL) - 2021-22 Students
makar.tereshin.21@ucl.ac.uk

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

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 attention to the politics and histories of the infrastructures that support the Russian space industry. It foregrounds specific “topographies of power” (Ferguson, 2006), exploring the uneven socio-political, economic, and environmental relations that underpin the operation of the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. 

Primary supervisor: Michal Murawski, UCL
Secondary supervisor: Victor Buchli, UCL