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I received my PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge in 2005 and my BA in Anthropology from the University of British Columbia in 1995.
Prior to joining Laurier, I was a postdoctoral fellow at the Harriman Institute at Columbia University (2005-2006) and at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany (2005).
My research has analyzed the processes through which places and landscapes on Ukraine’s Black Sea Coast acquire identities and material forms in relation to changing state boundaries, political economic relations, and geopolitics in Europe. My doctoral research about Ukraine’s Black Sea port of Odesa was based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2001- 2002, and showed how residents’ engagements with the city’s histories, texts and pre-revolutionary architecture challenged some of Ukraine’s nationalizing narratives by positioning the city as a cosmopolitan “place apart.” Using the metaphor of kaleidoscope, I traced the ways in which engagements with history, myth and literature in museums, schools, walking groups and markets conjured the city as part of divergent and overlapping cultural geographies of nation and empire.
Since 2008 I have examined the ecological and material politics of place-making in a Ukrainian-Romanian Transboundary Biosphere Reserve in Ukraine’s Danube Delta. I have published a series of articles about the impact of new environmental regulation on human and more-than-human landscapes. These include the role of the politics of scientific expertise and the material capacities of irrigation infrastructure in preventing activists from restoring a lagoon ecosystem; how understandings of politics and the political in nonliberal places challenge the adoption of participatory environmental management approaches premised on liberalism; and the ways in which socialist modernization and postsocialist deindustrialization have terrestrialized townspeople’s livelihoods and accelerated the siltation of canals in the Danube Delta town of Vylkove known as “the Ukrainian Venice.” My current research is focused on apiculture and the development of apiculture-related scientific research in Ukraine.
- SSHRC Insight Grant "Beelines and Borderlands: Science and Sociality in Maintaining Ukraine's Carpathian Honeybees" (2019-2024)
- SSHRC Workshop Grant "Engaging Resources: New Anthropological Perspectives in Natural Resource Environments" (2012)
- SSHRC Standard Grant "Bordering Nature in the Danube Delta: Conservation, Politics, and Place-Making in a Ukrainian-Romanian Transboundary Biosphere Reserve" (2009-2012)
- Anthropology and Archaeology Committee nominee for the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Aurora Prize (2009).
- Richardson, Tanya & Darya Tsymbalyuk. "Environmental Humanities, Ukrainian Studies: It's Time to Talk." Network in Canadian History and Environment/Nouvelle initiative Canadienne en histoire de l'environnement. Nov. 25, 2022.
- Richardson, Tanya & Leonora Adamchuk. "World Bee Day During the Russian Invasion." Bee Culture. August 2022.
- Richardson, Tanya. "Litigating for Legality: Nature Conservation, Commercial Fisheries, and Disputed Territoriality in Ukraine's Danube Delta." Journal of Agrarian Change. (2021).
- Richardson, Tanya. "Displacing the Delta: Notes on the Anthropology of the Earth's Physical Features." In Delta Life: Dynamic Environments Where Rivers Meet the Sea. (2021)
- Richardson, Tanya. "The Regional Life of Geopolitical Conflict: The Case of Odes(s)a Oblast." Soviet and Post-Soviet Review. (2019)
- Richardson, Tanya. "The Terrestrialization of Amphibious Life in a Danube Delta 'Town on Water.'" Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society. (2018)
- Richardson, Tanya. "Managing Ambiguous Amphibians: Feral Cows, People and Place in Ukraine's Danube Delta." Canadian Slavonic Papers. (2018).
- Richardson, Tanya. “Where the Water Sheds: Disputed Deposits at the Ends of the Danube.” In Watersheds: The Poetics and Politics of the Danube River. (2016).
- Richardson, Tanya. “Objecting (to) Infrastructure: Ecopolitics at the Ukrainian Ends of the Danube.” Science as Culture. (2016).
- Richardson, Tanya. “The Politics of Multiplication in a Failed Soviet Irrigation Project, Or, How Sasyk Has Been Kept from the Sea.” Ethnos. (2016).
- Richardson, Tanya. “On the Limits of Liberalism in Participatory Environmental Governance: Conflict and Conservation in Ukraine’s Danube Delta.” Development and Change. (2015).
- Richardson, Tanya. “(In)accessible Land: The Changing Practices and Regulation of Gardening in the Reedbeds of Ukraine’s Danube Delta.” In The Biopolitics of the Danube Delta: Nature, History, Policies. (2015).
- Richardson, Tanya. “Odessa’s Two Big Differences (and a few small ones). Life after the Maidan and May 2.” Eurozine. (2014).
- Richardson, Tanya and Gisa Weszkalnys. “Resource Materialities: New Anthropological Approaches to Natural Resource Environments.” Introduction to a special issue of Anthropological Quarterly. (2014).
- Richardson, Tanya. Kaleidoscopic Odessa: History and Place in Contemporary Ukraine. (2008).
- AN232g Climate Change, Culture and Society
- AN314 Animals and People
- AN349 Natures, Cultures, Environments
- AN348 Space, Place and Culture
- AN345 Life After Socialism
- AN336 Culture, Power and Politics
- GS102 Mapping Global Studies
- GS220 Being Human in a Global Age
- GS340s Bugs in the System: Insects and Global Studies
- GS451 City Worlds
- GS425 The Global Lives of Natural Resources
Contact Info:
Office location: DAWB 2133
Office hours: TBA
Languages spoken: English, Ukrainian, Russian
Personal website: wlu-ca/academia.edu/TanyaRichardson