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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.