"Experimental Rabbits": Living With and Being Studied at a Soviet Nuclear Test Site in Kazakhstan

From 1949 to 1989, the Soviet Union detonated 456 nuclear devices at the Semipalatinsk Test Site in northeast Kazakhstan, leaving a landscape still contaminated today. Drawing on more than a decade of fieldwork in a small village on the edge of the test site, anthropologist Magdalena Stawkowski asks why people choose to stay on radioactive land, and what their experience reveals about medicine, science, and consent. Residents have been studied by Soviet and later international scientists for generations, often without being told the results. In response, they have built a cooperative way of life they call sami po sebe, "on their own." This talk introduces the history of Soviet nuclear testing and explores what this community's story means for medical anthropology and bioethics.

Magdalena Stawkowski is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology and a faculty associate at the Walker Institute for International Studies at the University of South Carolina. She is also a researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies in Copenhagen and  a fellow in the Center for Slavic, Eurasian and East European Studies at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Stawkowski received her PhD from the University of Colorado Boulder in 2014. Previously, she was a postdoctoral teaching scholar in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at North Carolina State University. Prior to that, she was a MacArthur Nuclear Security Fellow and a Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) at Stanford University. Her research has been supported by a number of grants, including those from the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, IREX, the Danish Council for Independent Research, and others.