Meet the team

Olga Ulturgasheva (PhD; Cambridge) serves as a Principal Investigator and leads the ‘Russia’ Team. She will facilitate a synergistic dialogue between the ‘Russia’ team members, Russian as well international natural scientists and Siberian Indigenous reindeer herders and hunters. For two decades she has been engaged in a number of anthropological, collaborative and cross-disciplinary studies exploring human and non-human personhood, animist cosmologies,  climate change, resilience, and adaptation patterns in the Arctic. She is the author of Narrating the Future in Siberia: Childhood, Adolescence and Autobiography among the Eveny (Berghahn Books 2012) and co-editor of Animism in Rainforest and Tundra: Personhood, Animals, Plants and Things in Contemporary Amazonia and Siberia (Berghahn 2012). Her latest book, Risky Futures: Climate, Geopolitics and Local Realities in the Uncertain Circumpolar North (Berghahn Book 2022) which she edited together with Barbara Bodenhorn, focuses on the latest implications of climate change for our understanding of environmental risk, co-production of knowledge, and cross-disciplinary collaboration.

Mally Stelmaszyk (PhD; University of Edinburgh) is a Post-Doctorate Research Associate in Social Anthropology. She has conducted ethnographic research on cursing and shamanic practice in post-Soviet Tuva. In particular, her work focused on transformative qualities of sound and music in shamanic rituals and animistic relationships. Her research interests include shamanic practice, occultism, sounds and music art, post-colonialism, animism and addiction studies. Her recent publications are: Voiced into being: The power of sound and the phenomenon of cursing in Kyzyl, Tuva. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute.2021. Vol. 27 (1): 90-107; and Turbulent beings. Curses and systems of healing cooperation in post-Soviet Tuva. Curare, Journal of Medical Anthropology. 2018. Vol. 41 (1+2): 51-62.

Hanna Oosterveen is a PhD student in Social Anthropology. She has an MSc in Human Ecology: Culture, Power, and Sustainability from Lund University. Her Master’s thesis focused on non-local permafrost researchers’ approaches to community collaboration in the Canadian Arctic and Subarctic. Her research also highlighted the challenges non-local permafrost researchers face when allying with communities living with permafrost. For her PhD project, she will expand on this work, focusing on the definition and position of Western research in permafrost zones from the perspective of those living there. Her research interests include poststructuralism, posthumanism, knowledge politics, and permafrost dynamics.

Nina Kruglikova is a Post-Doctorate Research Associate in History/Philosophy of Science. She has a DPhil in Geography and the Environment from the University of Oxford (Trinity College, 2014). Her doctoral thesis is an ethnographic study which comprised a year of fieldwork in a major campaigning environmental NGO and focused on the mediation of scientific knowledge from an STS perspective. Her expertise includes environmental activism and international scientific cooperation. She has worked as a consultant for UN projects, and contributed as an author on citizen science to the Global Environmental Outlook–6 (GEO–6) report. She has organised and presented at various international conferences and workshops on environmental policy, sustainable development and philosophy of science. 

Tony Milligan is a Senior Researcher in the Philosophy of Ethics based at King’s College London. He works as a member of the KCL-based China team while contributing to the connections between the China and the Russia teams. He is comparing new assemblages of scientific knowledge that are produced when scientists envision a world transformed by climate change in China and Russia. He has a research specialism in the ethics of space exploration, and a particular interest in tracking pathways from the sky to the ground. Previous publications include the co-edited white paper on Astrobiology and Society in Europe Today (2018); the co-edited volume The Ethics of Space Exploration (2016); and Nobody Owns the Moon: The Ethics of Space Exploitation (2015).

The China Team is led by Katherine Swancutt and is based at the King’s College London. You can read more about the China Team here: cosmovis.uk/#team.