Dr. Makar Tereshin is a social anthropologist and documentary photographer. He holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from University College London. His research interests concern material culture studies, environmental and visual anthropology. Makar specialises in the ethnographic study of large-scale technological and industrial infrastructures, with a focus on the social, political, and environmental transformations they generate in Russia and Kazakhstan.

Following the key infrastructural nodes of the Russian space industry in Kazakhstan, Makar’s PhD research examined communities, ecologies and economies that form in and around the Baikonur Cosmodrome. Interrogating the politics and ecology of Baikonur, he investigated how the space industry mediates different ethical and political projects at different scales: advancing space exploration, subjecting communities to systematic inequality and environmental injustice, and providing a livelihood. This project was supported by the London Arts and Humanities Partnership.

As part of SAVA, Makar investigates how nuclear energy, water management, and botanical experiments converged in a desert city of Aqtau, Kazakhstan. Built as a model socialist city Aqtau was promoted as a manifestation of the Soviet utopian vision of mastering, transforming, and exploiting extreme environments. The city’s Nuclear Power Plant supplied energy and desalinated water from the Caspian Sea, enabling efforts to green the desert through projects like the Mangyshlak experimental botanical garden. By focusing on the work of this garden, Makar aims to unravel the complex interplay between industrial development, urban planning, ecological adaptation and transformation of extreme environments in Soviet Kazakhstan, while also examining how these processes continue to shape the social fabric of contemporary Aqtau.

Email address: m.tereshin@uea.ac.uk