Justyna Aniceta Turkowska is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of History at the University of Bielefeld. She is a member of the Global 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. 

Brokers of Change: Geological Experts in West Africa in the 1960s-1970s

Her current project analyses the transfer and circulation of technical geological expertise and the role of experts and their activities within the Global North-East-South solidarity ties and cooperation patterns in the 1960s-1980s. By following the European survey teams and European-African geological cooperations in their attempts to (re-)map Ghana, the research project tells a story of how the geological theoretical and praxeological exchange looked like and how it was put into practice in a multi-cultural working environment. It thus examines geological production of changes through practices of interrelations and active material practices, and by doing so, shows how the globally conceived but locally situated new spatialisation and field-based redrawing of the portable knowledge of the experts reshaped the local, transnational and global epistemic context and the (new) transnational space of globalised expertise.

Here the link to my university website: https://ekvv.uni- bielefeld.de/pers_publ/publ/PersonDetail.jsp?personId=427161197&lang=EN#curriculum_vitae

Most recent publications:

- Reordering of Space and References: Eastern European Geologists in Westafrika in the 1960s, in Marcus Colla, Paul Betts (eds.): Rethinking Socialist Space, Palgrave MacMillan ‚St Antony’s Series 2024 (forthcoming).

- Kolonisatoren:innen und Kolonisierte im Zwiegespräch. ‚Koloniale Agitation’ in den Ostprovinzen des Deutschen Reichs, in: Gesellschaft und Geschichte, Themenheft: Preußen postkolonial, 4/2021, 589-622 (peer-reviewed).