The Colloquium in International Security Studies presents
Nataliia Laas, Henry Chauncey ‘57 Postdoctoral Fellow:
“Environmental Citizenship and the Economy of Waste in the Post-WWII Soviet Union.”
A historian, Laas specializes in political economy, consumer society, gender, the history of the social sciences, and environmental history in the Soviet Union. She will present “Environmental Citizenship and the Economy of Waste in the Post-WWII Soviet Union.”
Laas’s project overturns the conventional view that the late Soviet economy was primarily plagued by shortages and shows that the chief difficulty was in fact overproduction and waste. This economy of waste provoked popular “waste anxieties” about the squandering and overexploitation of natural resources, labor, and capital. By the 1980s, Soviet society became thoroughly engrossed in radiation- and nitrate-poisoning panics over toxic waste found in food, water, and air. Politicized “waste anxieties” prompted the people to defend their consumer and ecological rights and to reimagine their relationship with the socialist state through the concept of environmental citizenship.