Those were the times…. When one could still travel and give a talk! Exactly one year ago I presented my research on Mt Fuji World Heritage in Helsinki.
The presentation “Nature or Culture? Negotiating Outstanding Universal Value of Mt Fuji in the Japanese World Heritage Nomination” can be watched on their Twitter account.
Reconstruction of the plague doctor mask and a modern protective gear for infectious diseases. Perhaps it is good that the museum is closed right now - these protective suits are a very priced commodity right now.
During 2015-2016, I had a privilege to work together with my colleagues from KAJAK, the Estonian Centre for Environmental History, and Estonian National Museum on a part of their new permanent exhibition on humans and environment. The part that I was responsible for, was a display on health and environment in Estonia in a historical perspective. Then it was a nerd choice in many ways - today it is in focus again. From the beginning of the epidemics, the images of our plague mask replica started spreading on social media. Yesterday, Alar Karis, the director of the Museum published a blog post on our materials related to small-pox mortality and early vaccination in Estonia.
Small-pox part of the display was in many ways exciting. Materials on small-pox vaccination campaigns were in many ways abundant but to grasp and visualise the context in many ways rather difficult as they principally consisted of books filled with the names of the vaccinated. But then there was an original knife for vaccination, as well as books that instructed how to do it - vaccination was carried out by local pastors, making thus sure that the vaccines also reached the remotest parts of the country. To convey that feeling and the process, we even staged a short film (freely watchable on youtube). Arguments against people who did not want to vaccinate their children remain eerily relevant for today. For a long time, we were searching for a photo of somebody with small-pox scars, but even Stalin’s photos are all retouched. In the end, University of Tartu’s History Museum found a scary series in their collection where you can see the deterioration of a small-pox patient day by day.
A man with small-pox on the 4th and 8th day of being at Tartu University Hospital in 1920s(?). I’m not sure he had a 9th day… TÜ Muuseumi fotokogu, nr ÜAM F 445:107/5 F
Choosing diseases that would be displayed at the exhibition was not so easy either. 1812 plague was something that we definitely wanted to include, but finding original objects from a disease outbreak more than 200years ago that had killed close to 80% of the population in some parts of Estonia, is very challenging. Since everybody was busy with surviving, nobody had time to actually keep track of how many people died, and most objects were destroyed, our knowledge is very scarce. In the end, the plague outbreak was represented with a short film of the archaeological excavation of Tallinn’s Santa Barbara graveyard and a running list of people who died of plague in Tallinn that keeps running and running without an end in sight. And the mask, of course, even though we have no historical documents that prove that exactly this was the design used in Estonia at that time.
This is not all of what we managed to fit into the small space dedicated to environmental history of epidemics in Estonia. There is water contamination by disposed medicine, development of quinine, emergence of sterilisation and hospital hygiene, and folk medicine, among other things. In the course of preparing it, I got to see the amazing medical and pharmaceutical collections of the Tartu University History Museum and stocked up a whole pile of material on other diseases that never made it to the exhibition and keep waiting for me to write about them.
Variatsioonid variolatsiooni teemal ehk „ilusad tüdrukud saavad paremini mehele kui rõugearmilised"
ERMi direktor Alar Karis. Ajal, mil uus viirushaigus on alustanud inimkonna proovile panemist, on arusaadavalt huvi selle teema vastu kõrgendatud. Selles blogiloos ongi jutuks nakkushaigused, täpsemalt võitlus rõugete vastu. Karmim haigus, mis omal ajal eestlasi maha niitis leetrite, düsenteeria, koolera, tüüfuse, sarlakite, malaaria ja rõugete kõrval, oli kindlasti katk.
Some things take a really long time to come out.
Finally, everybody can HERE read a collection of articles on the Theory of Culture, where I have been contributing to one text on boundaries in space and time in the last 100 years of Estonia. I appear as a last author in some kind of quasi-science type of author listing, since I actually worked quite a bit with the manuscript, most of all the theoretical and background parts though.
It is quite a heavy reading, I think, but for me, an important one as well. It shows quite well how material and discursive borders do not always overlap, neither in time nor in space. The changes occur at different speeds in different spheres of culture, thus, for example, the discursive reality can be entirely Soviet, while the economic production, landownership or everyday practices can be still very much behind in the pervious economic order. Practices can maintain old boundaries long after they have been officially erased from the maps or history books.
Some texts grow old while you keep waiting for them to get published. “Plurality of pasts and boundaries: evidence from the last hundred years of Estonia“ has aged relatively well. Even the opening vignette on the EU/Estonian border with Russia reads well amidst the new rhetorical and physical closing of borders in Europe over the last months. How many of those borders that have been closed now are actually physically closed?
Raili Nugin, Tiiu Jaago, Anu Kannike, Kalevi Kull, Hannes Palang, Anu Printsmann, Pihla Maria Siim, Kati Lindström. 2020. Plurality of pasts and boundaries: evidence from the last hundred years of Estonia. In: Anu Kannike, Katre Pärn, Monika Tasa (eds.), Interdisciplinary Approaches to Culture Theory. Tartu: University of Tartu Press, pp. 334-373.
BBC has prepared a video clip about the island of Saaremaa and I discuss on the Cold War Coasts blog why this brings back the memories of the Cold War.
Estonia's 'corona island' a flashback from the Cold War
BBC.com featured today a video piece on "Estonia's 'corona island'", as they put it, that is, island Saaremaa that finds itself completely cut off from the mainland under the harsh COVID-19 measures taken in Estonia. Whether or not it is nice to label an island a 'corona island' because there are many diagnosed cases, is...
This spring term I am teaching one course - History of Science and Technology - which I was very much looking forward to. Now it had to be put online almost overnight. On Friday, March 5th, the guidelines still said that teaching goes on as normal, on Monday, March 6th, it was decided that all teaching has to be online. On March 7, it was our first classroom meeting, which now had to be taken online overnight.
Teaching online is not really a new thing to me. I taught Landscape Semiotics at the University of Tartu 100% online between 2007-2010 and 50% online between 2010 and 2012, long before today’s Zoom appeared. Even got an award for it. One thing that these years taught me, is that online courses take so much more work than normal seminar-based courses. It is so easy to overdo assignments, and yet you have to build in a reading comprehension check everywhere, you need to constantly see that people hand in all they need by the time they need to. These days, it is particularly demanding: students may fall ill, others have been called back by the home universities half way into the term, and then I need to build in a possibility for myself to fall really ill and not be able to do anything. It has taken some work to get this running but all in all I think it is fun. Some of the topics, such as health and theories of contagion, or science denial are more urgent than ever.
To avoid people on the other side of the zoom screen from getting distracted by my wall or kids who flash by, I have set up a digital background: a cool picture that I took of the Esperanza base in this February. It felt quite professional to speak about the post-WWII financing of big science and the development of climate science on the background of an Antarctic base.
Applause to everyone who can keep concentrated during the endless Zoom meetings. I can’t keep my eyes off other people’s bookshelves,. for example. To hide mine, I’ve put up this screen. If I’m boring, you can try and count the penguins.
While we were sifting through the submissions to the Second Baltic Conference for the Environmental Humanities and Social Sciences (BALTEHUMS II) and were ready with the acceptance decisions, it became gradually clear that the situation with the COVID-19 pandemic has made it impossible to hold the conference on the planned dates. So the Local Organising Committee and the Programme Committee have been trying to come up with a solution.
For the time being, we decided that it will not be an online conference, because one of the main purposes of BALTEHUMS II is to get to know each other and network, to find new collaboration partners. Online papers do not help you with that. Kaunas University of Technology has preliminarily offered to host the conference in the first days of October. So we have decided to postpone BALTEHUMS II to October 1-2, 2020. It will still be held at the Kaunas University of Technology, Faculty of Social sciences, Arts and Humanities, hosted by KTU’s dynamic Civil Society and Sustainability Research group. Keep your eyes on the conference Facebook Event or its website for updates.
At this moment we are planning to re-open the call in late summer to invite those for whom the original dates were inconvenient. Those who rejected will also have a possibility to update their abstract at that occasion or submit a completely new abstract for review instead.
Just as we had laid down the plans for a social program at Kaunas’ vast water reservoir under which many submerged villages lie, the conference had to be cancelled. October is not quite as nice as May but we hope to be able to hike there anyway! Photo: By Creative, CC BY-SA 3.0
Minami-sōma in March 2016. This village was considered safe to return to at that time. However, double radiation monitors and both of them out of order give hardly any feelings of security for those who return and need to send their kids to the school in the background.
I do think that one of the most important academic skills is to know your limits. To not speak about things you are not competent in. As you know, I am not always good at it: I have a very broad spectrum of topics I work with and am therefore guaranteed to step on a slippery ground sooner or later. However, in a crises, I think it is particularly important to avoid giving personal opinions on things where confusing or wrong information can lead to reduced compliance with life-saving regulations.
So I will not be posting opinions on quarantines, testing or other aspects on COVID-19 that demand medical knowledge. But I do think I have some knowledge about Japan and Fukushima (due to my involvement in the Nuclearwaters project), which is why I took on the challenge by Estonian daily Eesti Päevaleht to write something about Fukushima, Olympics and the Corona crises. This is a piece on crises communication. The main message is that delayed and contradicting messages reduce the credibility of the authorities and it is particularly dangerous in a situation where a crises unfolds rapidly and today’s information maybe entirely wrong by tomorrow. Even if the Olympics are safe in Japan, both in respect to Fukushima’s radioactivity (mind the Olympic torch route that passes at only 2,3 kms from the Fukushima Daiichi where the melted fuel is still lying around) or COVID-19, many of us would still have difficulties in believing it, because of government’s attempts to suppress information at multiple instances.
Stack of nuclear debris in giant black bags, at stone cast from the Pacific shore ion march 11, 2016, on the 5th anniversary of the accident. The tree has dried because of the salt of the tsunami, not radioactivity.
The text is of course in Estonian but for those of you who can read it, it is available HERE. (Siin on muidugi üks faktiviga ka: 2011. aastal ei astunud reha otsa mitte Abe, vaid Naoto Kan, kuid kui Abe 2012. aastal võimu üle võttis trampis ta sellel rehal veel suurem rõõmuga kui Naoto Kan kunagi trampinud oligi. Naoto Kanist sai aga tuumaenergia vastu võitleja)
KTH entrance now in early March.
It has been nice to be back from almost two months of field work In Antarctica, followed by a week of well-deserved vacations with my family.
First work week at KTH welcomed me with the humbling news that I have been elected to the newly established Faculty Assembly (Skolkollegium) of the School of Architecture and Built Environment at the KTH. Together with Per Högselius, we will be representing the Department of Philosophy and History in the Assembly which is meant to increase the weight of collegial decision making at the university. Through the Faculty Assembly, we can bring up burning questions across the whole school and make sure they get noticed at the decision-making level.
Nobody knows yet how this newly established assembly should work and a lot of work lies ahead in setting down the structures for it. It will be an exciting task for the upcoming two years!
I have written a post on CHAQ2020 expedition’s contribution to the museum of the Esperanza Base. See here
Contributing to the museum at Esperanza Base - MELTING HISTORY
Kati Lindström blogs about designing posters for the museum at Esperanza, one of the southernmost museums in the world. How to design an addition to a museum that you have never been to? A museum that is among the most austral ones in the world, where you cannot go to think, rethink, measure and measure again?
Next stop: Esperanza Base!
Next station: Esperanza! - MELTING HISTORY
The team has wrapped up their fieldwork at Snow Hill, and is now working at Esperanza. Kati Lindström is filling us in on the details.
Me and Achim are chasing a forgotten nuclear project.
Chasing after shadows - or - The nuclear power plant never built in Estonia
Sometimes interesting intellectual journeys can start with literally one small dot on a map. This happened to us when Achim was looking at a book that featured the map of nuclear power plants planned for the Soviet Union. Do you know anything about this dot on the territory of Estonia, he asked.