Seeing Beyond Catastrophe: Rethinking Development and Environmental Transformation in the Aral Sea Region of Uzbekistan
| dc.contributor.advisor | Johnson, Leigh | |
| dc.contributor.author | Shields, Katherine | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2024-01-10T14:52:31Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 2024-01-10 | |
| dc.description.abstract | The Aral “catastrophe” has resulted from ongoing diversion of water flowing into the Aral Sea for irrigation, largely cotton, primarily from the 1960s until present. The shrinking of the sea has resulted in loss of livelihoods, local climate change, health impacts, and the creation of the world’s newest desert. This dissertation sees beyond catastrophe to de-exceptionalize the Aral Sea and tell nuanced stories of the human and more-than-human (e.g. trees, fish, insects) residents of the region. It highlights the life, value and beauty of the Aral Sea region while showing how the region has been devalued. Using feminist mixed-methods that treat all data as situated knowledges and embodied (rather than disembodied) visions, this work interweaves the partial perspectives of ethnographic data from nine months of fieldwork, geophysical, and remote sensing data while attending to the politics of these data’s creation. This dissertation contributes to scholarly conversations on the co-production of development and expertise, political ecologies of the state, and feminist methods for human-environment interactions. Using ethnographic data, I first unpack the 2021 designation by the UN General Assembly – initiated at the behest of the Uzbek state – of the Aral Sea region as a “Zone of Ecological Innovations and Technologies.” I problematize the ideology of innovation that lies behind the “Zone” arguing instead for an ethos of repair. Next, I probe state-sponsored and crowed-funded plantation-style afforestation that is framed as mitigation of the consequences, particularly toxic dust, of the dried Aral Seabed. Data come from a visual classification of the seabed using Google Earth Pro and participant observation. I argue afforestation should be understood as a performance of environmental stewardship and mobilization of trees as infrastructure rather than ecosystem restoration. Finally, interweaving remote sensing, geophysical and ethnographic data, I illustrate how flows of water into the Amu Daryo delta have decreased and how surface water in the delta is increasingly variable over time and discontinuous across space. I conclude that the greatest risk for residents is not toxic dust, but ongoing violence of water allocation policies that continue to remake the landscape and affect residents’ ways of life, livelihoods and nutrition. | en_US |
| dc.description.embargo | 2025-07-26 | |
| dc.identifier.uri | https://hdl.handle.net/1794/29240 | |
| dc.language.iso | en_US | |
| dc.publisher | University of Oregon | |
| dc.rights | All Rights Reserved. | |
| dc.subject | Afforestation | en_US |
| dc.subject | Aral Sea | en_US |
| dc.subject | Development | en_US |
| dc.subject | Expertise | en_US |
| dc.subject | Feminist mixed-methods | en_US |
| dc.subject | Political Ecology | en_US |
| dc.title | Seeing Beyond Catastrophe: Rethinking Development and Environmental Transformation in the Aral Sea Region of Uzbekistan | |
| dc.type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation | |
| thesis.degree.discipline | Department of Geography | |
| thesis.degree.grantor | University of Oregon | |
| thesis.degree.level | doctoral | |
| thesis.degree.name | Ph.D. |