Institute at Brown for Environment and Society

Jenny Lhamo Tsundu's dissertation, "How A Place Moves: Bratsk, 1917-1991" wonders whether an entity defined by its very immobility - a place - might in fact be in motion after all. Examining the history of a place which 'moved' to higher ground as a result of hydroelectric development in the 1950s and 60s, the project draws on varieties of literal and figurative movement, reading the history of the Siberian city of Bratsk, and the Soviet Union more broadly, through classical paradoxes of identity, change, and motion, as well as 19th and 20th-century discussions of dialectics, historical materialism, phenomenology, poetry, mathematics, and science.