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 natural scientists and Siberian indigenous reindeer herders and hunters; and will contribute to collaborative exchange with the KCL-based ‘China’ team. Dr Ulturgasheva has carried out ethnographic research on childhood and adolescence, narrative and memory, animist and nomadic cosmologies, reindeer herding and hunting, climate change and the latest envrionmental transformations in Siberia and Alaska. Since 2006 she has been engaged in a number of international projects exploring human and non-human personhood, youth resilience, climate change and adaptation patterns in Siberia, American Arctic and Amazonia. 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).
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, indigenous knowledge, history of climate change studies 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.
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.
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.