- Convenors:
-
Ariel Otruba
(Virginia Tech)
Kate Shields (Rhodes College)
Megan Dixon (The College of Idaho)
Evangeline McGlynn (Harvard University)
Send message to Convenors
- Chair:
-
Kate Shields
(Rhodes College)
- Discussant:
-
Ariel Otruba
(Virginia Tech)
- Format:
- Panel (open)
- Mode:
- Face-to-face part of the conference
- Theme:
- Geography
- Location:
- 112
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 19 November, -
Time zone: America/New_York
Description
Do you feel like your work sits at the periphery of one or more Area Studies regions and their associated professional organizations (e.g., ASEEES, MESA, or AAS), yet lies at the center of an ecological, transportation, cultural, or some other type of process or assemblage? Does your work cross current political boundaries alongside migratory species, commodities, or ideas? If so, we invite you to join a conversation aimed at defining a new regional imaginary: the Eurasian Inland Seas (EIS). Analogous to Mediterranean or Polar Studies, this session centers water—specifically the Black, Caspian and Aral Seas—to advance critical dialogue on “Eurasian Studies” and alternative regional frameworks. We welcome contributions from any discipline in the Eurasian Inland Seas region that can help further define the EIS region through their analysis, methodology, or empirical findings. Potential topics include:
- Human and more-than-human interactions or migrations within or across the EIS
- River, energy, transportation, or other resource networks in and across the EIS region
- Processes of de- and re-bordering across the EIS region
- Trans-national/regional cultural and economic practices
This panel is organized by Geographies of the Eurasian Inland Seas (GEIS), a working group of geographers and aligned social scientists engaged in research on the Caucasus, Central Asia, Siberia, and adjoining areas. In solidarity with broader efforts to decolonize and re-center “Eurasian studies,” GEIS seeks to promote networking, intellectual collaboration, and deeply contextualized environmental and spatial inquiry of the region, which is often marginalized within larger professional associations.
Accepted papers
Session 1 Wednesday 19 November, 2025, -Abstract
As human-environment geographers working in the Caucasus, Central Asia, and North Asia, we often feel doubly peripheralized. First, our sites of study are categorized as the margins of our area studies regions; second, among geographers we are told that our empirical cases are exceptional because of their regional or peripheral location, and cannot contribute to generalizable knowledge. In this paper we begin to address the research question: How can we re-spatialize scholarship from and about those places and environments in Eurasia that are often on the margins of professional organizations (both area studies and disciplinary) and their annual conventions? This can involve destabilizing typical center-periphery designations. We aim to take lessons from Mediterranean and Polar Studies, both of which represent important reconceptualizations of center/periphery relationships. We also draw on scholarship within our region(s) surrounding de/re-bordering practices including alternative regionalisms (Müller 2018) and imagined geographies. We propose Geographies of the Eurasian Inland Seas (EIS) as a research agenda, illustrating our approach through two preliminary examples: the landscapes of the EIS and current discourses of ruination and restoration, and transportation, migration, and displacement around the EIS. We center inland seas not just for the gravitational pull of culture to water, but also to use the metaphorical value of the “inland sea,” itself an epistemelogically rambunctious entity, to challenge ourselves.
Abstract
Death is a grim and often overlooked subject in historical inquiry. However, at the borderlands of the Russian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and Qajar Iran, death - specifically the management of dead bodies - became a site of transimperial negotiation. This paper examines how the intersection of death, ritual, and imperial bureaucracy shaped debates and policies over burial practices, piety, afterlife, and communal identity. Focusing on Shi’a Muslim communities in the South Caucasus under Russian imperial rule in the nineteenth century, it explores the practice of preserving the bodies of the deceased for extended periods—ranging from several months to several years—before transporting them to sacred Shi’a cities like Karbala, Qom, and Najaf for final burial. Through the lens of imperial thanatopolitics, this paper investigates how the transnational funerary ritual known as naql al-jana’iz unfolded from the vantage point of the South Caucasus in the nineteenth century.