Justyna Aniceta Turkowska

Justyna Aniceta Turkowska combines the history of knowledge with postcolonial and transnational issues. Her work explores how expertise in different historical contexts – from nineteenth-century biopolitics to twentieth-century technical aid programs – helps shape social orders and political relations. Through linking geopolitical interests with everyday interactions, Turkowska’s approach illustrates that global orders were not negotiated exclusively in political centres, but, essentially, in the material and social spaces of experts. By intertwining local practices with global processes, she demonstrates the dynamics that gave rise to new knowledge orders, power constellations, and social sensibilities in Europe and Africa. She thus offers a reassessment of East-South interdependencies during the Cold War, in which technical knowledge is posited as a medium of political positioning and social transformation.

Brokers of Change: Geological Experts in West Africa and Mapping the Postcolonial Order in the 1960s–1970s

My project is dedicated to an entangled global history of political and scientific relations between the Global North and the Global South through analysing the contacts and clashes between human and nonhuman actors from the North American, (Eastern) European, and West African context. By addressing the re-spatialization of postcolonial relationality as imagined and enacted on the ground, and by simultaneously addressing the emergence of new political and social sensibilities in this context, it shows what new spaces of agency and sites of sociability were opened up by geological cooperation during the Cold War era, given that the most critical question during the decolonization process was: Which globally and industrially relevant natural resources of Sub-Saharan African countries are recoverable, and who could benefit from their exploration and in what way? In this context, politically highly contested Ghana became the centre of geological scrutiny and a mecca for technical assistance for various actors and interests. By focussing on the mapping of Ghana in a negotiation between Ghanaian and international geologists, my project asks how the connection between raw materials and power was materialized, what shared understanding of the world was produced in this process, and how the geologically produced new international relationality affected the political and societal transformation of Ghana and its (Eastern) European partners.

2016 PhD in History, Justus Liebig University of Giessen, Germany
2007 MA in History, Leibniz University of Hannover, Germany
2005 MA in Political Science, University of Warsaw, Poland

Lecturer in Global History, University of Bielefeld, Germany

“Ghana’s Path to Scientific Powerhouse Africa’s: Eastern European Experts and the Reconfiguration of Knowledge in the Context of the Cold War”. In The Sputnik Effect in Global Perspective: Competition, Collaboration, and the Circulation of Knowledge. Edited by Daniele Cozzoli. London: Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming.
“Reordering of Space and References: Polish Geologists in West Africa and Their Mapping of the Postcolonial Order in the 1960s”. In Rethinking Socialist Space in the Twentieth Century, pp. 135–58. Edited by Marcus Colla and Paul Betts. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2024.
Der kranke Rand des Reiches: Sozialhygiene und nationale Räume in der Provinz Posen um 1900 (The Grieving Edge of the Empire: Social Hygiene, Morality and Nation in the Province of Posen at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century). Marburg: Verlag Herder-Institut, 2020.