Magdalena E. Stawkowski

University of South Carolina | USC · Department of Anthropology

Donald Trump stands out as the only U.S. president to break with historical precedent by openly displaying regard for authoritarian leaders. One of the main recipients of Trump’s admiration has been the president of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin. Both leaders have followed the strongman’s playbook: they have demonized large segments of soc...

The goal of this special issue is to offer critical explorations of territoriality both in historical and within contemporary special territorial designations, with a specific focus on space, place, and landscape rather than just individuals. The articles in the issue are linked by their novel application of the principal of extraterritoriality to...

This article is a case study of Koian, a former livestock and agricultural collective farm overlapping the border of the Semipalatinsk Nuclear Test Site in Kazakhstan. I examine how, despite economic hardships, village residents have reinvented their collective farm as a “collective bank” on a post-Soviet agro-nuclear landscape. Although informal e...

In recent years, the Institute of Radiation Safety and Ecology in Kazakhstan has proposed a plan to return large segments of the Soviet-era Semipalatinsk Nuclear Test Site to economic activity, notably farming and stock breeding. Despite fierce opposition to the plan, the Institute has framed these concerns as a case of ‘radiophobia’ or the irratio...

I first heard of “radioactive coal” in the summer of 2012, when I was living in the small village of Koyan, one of many settlements in Eastern Kazakhstan that hosted the Soviet-era Semipalatinsk Nuclear Test Site. A scandal over the sale of radioactive coal had erupted in the fall of 2011 when local media began reporting on a train from Kazakhstan...

The Semipalatinsk Nuclear Test Site in Kazakhstan was conceived as an experimental landscape where science, technology, Soviet Cold War militarism, and human biology intersected. As of 2015, thousands of people continue to live in rural communities in the immediate vicinity of this polluted landscape. Lacking good economic options, many of them cla...

This article traces disagreements about the genetic effects of low-dose radiation exposure as waged by James Neel (1915-2000), a central figure in radiation studies of Japanese populations after World War II, and Yuri Dubrova (1955-), who analyzed the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear power plant accident. In a 1996 article in Nature, Dubrova reported a stati...