Lidia is a social anthropologist who explores seasonally isolated communities affected by the decay of infrastructures in the post-Soviet space. Her interests include informal nature management, fishing and hunting, local perceptions of climate change, memory politics and the clash of different types of knowledge (expert and local, scientific and embodied). Lidia is a senior lecturer at HSE St. Petersburg and a member of the Siberian Environmental Changes Network (SecNET). Before her current research, she worked as a cultural sociologist at the State Hermitage Museum.
During CONTOURS, Lidia will study coastal villages along the Ob river that remain largely invisible to cruise tourists who travel the Ob from Novosibirsk to Yamal. Her focus is on rethinking resources and the area's touristic, historical and environmental aesthetics from the point of view of local inhabitants. This takes into consideration the complex history of forced relocations in the 1930s and 1940s, the questioning of rootedness, and the new "wildness" of the settlements on the ruins of Soviet infrastructures.
Find out about Lidia’s CONTOURS project on New wilderness on the ruins of soviet infrastructures