Forschungskolloquium KG: Will the Sea come back? Exploring temporalities and more-than-human entanglements of water scarcities in Aktau, Kazakhstan – 05.11.2025
Daria Volkova, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar
Will the Sea come back? Exploring temporalities and more-than-human entanglements of water scarcities in Aktau, Kazakhstan
Wann: 05.11.2025
Wo: Seminarraum 00.175, Tennenlohe, Wetterkreuz 15
Moderation: Prof. Dr. Sandra Jasper
In Aktau, most of the city’s water is produced through desalination. Since the city’s establishment in the 1960s, modernist narratives and efforts to combat water shortages and the related promise of abundance have persisted. Currently, the city’s water infrastructure frequently experiences breakdowns and emergencies. In this talk, Daria Volkova demonstrates how water scarcity is constructed and contested by integrating theories of relative resource scarcity (Mehta et al., 2019; Hellberg, 2018) with insights from studies on maintenance and repair (Martínez & Laviolette, 2019) and everyday futures (De Coss-Corzo, 2025). First, she will explore the intersection of nature-made and human-made scarcities and their associated temporalities. Authorities, technicians, and power plant representatives attribute current shortages to past decisions and management, thereby shifting the blame to the past. For present-day authorities and managers, modernization and planning are key to promising abundant futures. Addressing narratives of the inevitable deterioration of Soviet-built infrastructure, Daria shows how these narratives contribute to ‘naturalized’ perceptions of scarcity. Second, the talk will focus on the role of animals in signaling changes in water futures. The retreat of the shoreline and the death and illness of animals alter scarcity narratives, attributing blame more prominently to nature as a ‘neutral force’ and introducing uncertainties into visions of future abundance.
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