Dr. Tanya Richardson

Associate Professor (currently on sabbatical until June 30, 2013)

Contact Information

Email: trichardson@wlu.ca
Phone: 519-884-0710 ext.3865
Fax: 519-884-8854
Office Location: DAWB 5-120B (beside DAWB 5-120)
Office Hours: TBD

Academic Background

BA (1995) University of British Columbia

MPhil (2000) and PhD (2005) University of Cambridge

Biography

My current research addresses the politics of nature and environmentalism in the Odessa region of Southern Ukraine. Since 2009, I have been carrying out SSHRC-funded research in the Danube Delta town of Vilkovo on residents’ and nonresidents’ changing relationships with land, water, fish, reeds, and birds in the context of the creation of a transboundary biosphere reserve and a rapidly transforming political economy.  A second project examines the changing strategies of environmental activists in the Tatarbunary District in their struggles to dismantle a failed Soviet-era Irrigation project and restore Lake Sasyk as a saltwater estuary. I am also working with Gisa Weszkalnys to develop an anthropological approach to the study of natural resources that links an ethnographic approach with insights from posthumanist theory on the distributed nature of materiality. www.engagingresources.org. Previously I conducted research on urban place-making practices, memory, and cosmopolitanism in the Black Sea port of Odessa. 

Publications

Forthcoming "Resource Materialities" an introduction to a special issues on natural resource environments in Anthropological Quarterly.

Forthcoming "(In)Accessible Land: The Changing Practices and Regulation of Gardening in the Reedbeds of Ukraine’s Danube Delta" in The Danube Delta: Nature, History, Policies. Eds. Kristof van Assche and Constantin Iordachi. Central European University Press: Budapest.

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

2006. Living Cosmopolitanism? Tolerance, Religion and Local Identity in Odessa, in The Postsocialist Religious Question: Faith and Power in Central Asia and East-Central Europe. pp. 213-240. ed. Chris Hann. Lit: Berlin.

2005. The Place(s) of Moldovanka in the Making of Odessa, The Anthropology of East Europe Review. Fall: 72-89.

2005. Walking Streets, Talking History: The Making of Odessa, Ethnology 44 (1): 13-33.

2004. Disciplining the Past in Post-Soviet Ukraine: Memory and History in Schools and Families, Politics, Religion and Memory: The Past Meets the Present in Contemporary Europe. pp.109-135. eds. Frances Pine, Deema Kaneff and Haldis Haukanes. Lit: Munster.

2002. Along the Roads of Family Histories. (in Russian and Ukrainian) With contributions from Ilia Dyshlevoi, Denis Kovalev, Olesia Kushchevaia, Daria Olifer, Julia Serbina and Dmitrii Shubakov. Astroprint: Odessa.

Additional Information