Project Details
Projekt
Water Energies structuring space: Between Soviet Modernity, nation-building and global ecologies
Applicant
Professorin Dr. Susanne K. Frank
Subject Area
General and Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies
Term
since 2026
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 543294515
The project takes an analytical look at the constitution and entanglement of cultural, political, and economic spaces through the forms of water energy obtained from rivers and their infrastructures, at the transformation of these spaces and of the relationship between water energies and their cultural semantics between Soviet modernity, (post-)Soviet nation-building and global ecologies.Rivers as “flows of energy” (Tvedt/Jakobsson 2006), the river basins they form, their dramatic transformation through the landscape-, economy- and life-altering power plant constructions and water infrastructure of Soviet modernism, and the “Soviet Water Legacies” that are still effective today will be examined comparatively on the basis of two exemplary regions: 1. the Dnipro/Dnepr, which is coded as the national river of Ukraine, whose Soviet “legacy”, the six-stage cascade of hydroelectric power plants and barrages, was destroyed by Russia's war of aggression when the largest of them, the Kachovka Dam, was blown up, thus causing not only a flood and temporary environmental disaster, but also, paradoxically, possibly the longer-term ecological restitution of the nationally connoted landscape of the Dnipro thresholds; and 2. of the Naryn and Syr-Darja in Central Asia, the region in whose water-energy situation not only the sustainability, but also the failure of the Soviet project of violent empowerment and exploitative domination of water energy is most impressively manifested: what was planned as an energy production and irrigation project for an entire macro-region ended in the irretrievable drying up of the largest inland water body in Eurasia, the Aral Sea. What is new in research is the question, how local mythopoetics of water and its ecologies were transformed or subliminally preserved despite being overwritten by the coding of rivers as energy sources and conduits in the context of modernity, and how they not only gained new currency in the context of nation-building, but also became relevant for the development of a fundamentally new, ecological understanding of river-derived water energies and their space-forming agency. We investigate the convergences and tensions between water, waterways and power plants in their concrete spatial structuring and in their constantly 'in flux' design on the one hand, and the symbolic conceptualization of river/water energies and water spaces ('water nation'), in the case of Central Asia also with regard to competition with each other ('hydro hegemony'; 'resource nationalism'). In particular, the attribution of meaning as collective/national heritage and the agency, which alternates between water energies and symbolic transformations, are to be worked out on the basis of a discursively and medially diverse corpus of material.
DFG Programme
Research Units
International Connection
Kyrgyzstan
Cooperation Partner
Dr. Azel Murzakulova
