Julia Lajus “Nature Tourism on the White Sea Coast: Construction and Consumption of Historical Narratives and Material Objects”
ContoursTalks series
24.10.2022 16:00 – 18:00
Location: Rachel Carson Center, Conference Room (4th floor), Leopoldstr. 11A, 80802 Munich
Or join us online:
https://lmu-munich.zoom.us/j/97566782418?pwd=Q0hCSFBSWUVNWFQ0VTBHbGRmaTZBdz09
Julia’s talk leads to the coast of the White Sea in North-Western Russia where today religious pilgrims meet backpackers on their joint hunt for ‘sacred’ objects of Orthodox monastic legacy or natural beauty. While readily perceived as wilderness, the White Sea environment has been shaped over time by various forms of human-nature interactions. Hints of prehistorical as well as indigenous pagan cultures and Orthodox monastic ways of engaging with nature, remnants of the double exploitation of nature and humans by and in Soviet labor camps, and relicts of Soviet economic infrastructure constitute the material legacies that today translate into heritage and (nature) tourism attractions.
About Julia
An alumni Carson Fellow, Julia Lajus is currently a Visiting Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and the University of Helsinki. From 2016 to March 2022, she was Head of the Laboratory for Environmental and Technological History and Associate Professor at the Department of History, National Research University Higher School of Economics (HSE), St. Petersburg, Russia. From 2011 to 2015 she served as Vice-President of the European Society of Environmental History. Her research focuses on environmental history, especially of marine and polar areas, and the history of field sciences such as fisheries science, oceanography, and climatology.
About ContoursTalks
The ContoursTalks series is organized by the ERA.NET-funded research project CONTOURS: Conservation, Tourism, Remoteness. For more information on the CONTOURS project and ContoursTalks, click here.
If you have any further inquiries, please send an email to carolin.maertens@rcc.lmu.de