Public Lecture: Mapping Ghana: European Geologists as Agents of Change and New Sociality in the Cold War; Speaker: Justyna Turkowska

MIASA Conference Room, 2nd April, 2024

Abstract

From the late 1950s onwards, European geologists were widely dispatched to the “Global South” to survey the newly independent countries and forge new political-economic alliances. While deployed in West Africa, they became agents of a new spatial reorganisation of the respective countries and their symbolic and imagined place in the world. On top of this, their ideas about everything from technical assistance to socialist solidarity to images of Africa underwent a radical, identity-forming transformation. Drawing on European geological exploration in West Africa, particularly Ghana, in the 1960s and 1970s, this paper discusses the geological reorganisation of global patterns of cooperation, political solidarities and notions of globality and the differentiating world. It asks how geological exchange and collaboration in a multicultural environment — accompanied by ideological competition, economic pragmatism and the ubiquitous discourse of (socialist) “solidarity” — changed and reshaped politically contested spaces, reorganised postcolonial visions of relationality, and subsequently shaped West African notions of political transformation and the Eastern European global understanding of self and the world.

Justyna Aniceta Turkowska is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of History at the University of Bielefeld. She is a member of theGlobal and Entangled Histories Research Profile. She studied history, sociology and political science at the Universities of Warsaw (Poland), Berlin and Hannover (Germany), and completed her PhD at the University of Giessen (Germany) in 2016. Before coming to the University of Bielefeld, she worked as a lecturer at the University of Edinburgh in the School of History, Archeology and Classics, at the University of Bonn at the Department of History of Medicine and the University of Giessen (Germany) at the Department of Central and Eastern European History. Her research focuses on the history of science and global connections of (Eastern) Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries, emphasizing German Empire and European-African entanglement history