News of our students and graduates
Two of our second-year students presented their research at the “Migration Bridges in Eurasia: Migration as a Resource for Socioecomonic and Demographic Development” conference at MGIMO
Gaukhar Baltabayeva presented her paper “US immigration policies and Bolashak scholarship conditionality as shaping forces of international student migration from Kazakhstan to the US”
and
Adel Kosherbayeva presented her paper entitled “Ageing experience of women migrants in Germany: qualitative study”
On December 5 at 09:00, Xeniya Udod will be defending her thesis in a viva-voce examination. The viva is public and all are welcome to attend.
Room 8.105, School of Humanities and Social Sciences
Title: Feminisms in Kazakhstan: at the intersection of global influences and local contexts
Feminism has been gaining its momentum in Kazakhstan, with several feminist unions and numerous individual activists publicly promoting feminist ideas, advocating for gender equality and LBTIQ rights in the country. By drawing on in-depth interviews with the outspoken feminist activists, I posit that contemporary feminisms in Kazakhstan are now entering the stage of reflecting on their specific stance vis-à-vis the complex set of gender ideologies and practices concerning Central Asian women and their space in society, ranging from (but not limited to) the system of patriarchy, controversial Soviet project of “women’s liberation,” more recent influences of Western neoliberalism and capitalism, and the dominant discourse of “Western feminism.” My research data demonstrate that by admitting the constructed, complex nature of contemporary Kazakhstani feminisms, my respondents move to the elaboration of the modalities of the movement’s further prospects, which has the potential to form a particular postsocialist local feminism embedded in the region’s tangled geo-temporal realities.
Internal Advisers: Elizabeth Mount & Alima Bissenova
External Adviser: Marianne Kamp, Indiana University
On Thursday (May 3) at 15:00, Togzhan Kalamysheva will be defending her thesis in a viva-voce examination. The viva is public and all are welcome to attend.
Room 8.105, School of Humanities and Social Sciences
Title:
The Sociocultural Underpinnings of the Life Insurance Market in Kazakhstan
Abstract:
Life insurance is a financial tool used to provide for well-being of dependents in case of premature death or other risks that stop the income flow. The perception of life insurance differs across nations because of the differences in their social norms. This study is about Kazakhs’ perception of life insurance and the extent to which the idea of ensuring life is compatible with their norms and values. In the framework of this study, based on a large database of the life insurance company, I construct the profile of the Kazakhstani life insurance market and define consumption pattern across regions, the occupation of individuals, their age, gender and marital status. Further, I explain this consumption pattern by employing interviews with local people. I analyze my findings through concepts like risk-perception and death-perception that are central to the idea of ensuring life. As life insurance turns out to be incompatible with Kazakhs’ social norms, I explore local sales agents’ marketing strategies to overcome this cultural barrier.
Internal Advisers: Edwin Sayes & Zhanna Kapsalyamova
External Adviser: Prof. Bruno De Cordier, Ghent University
On Thursday (May 3) at 09.00, Di Wang will be defending her thesis in a viva-voce examination. The viva is public and all are welcome to attend.
Room 8.105, School of Humanities and Social Sciences
Title:
The Unofficial Russo-Qing Trade on the Eastern Kazakh Steppe and in Northern Xinjiang in the First Half of the 19th Century
Abstract:
The Treaty of Kuldja (Ili) signed in 1851 between the Russian empire and the Qing empire marked the start of the official Russo-Qing trade in Xinjiang. This thesis aims to explore the generally neglected pre-1851 unofficial Russo-Qing trade on the Eastern Kazakh steppe and in Northern Xinjiang by examining the trade in three area: Semipalatinsk, Tarbagatai and Ili. This pre-treaty era Russo-Qing trade was regarded as illegal on the Qing side with little information available, but legal on the Russian side with abundant data. By comparing the information in Chinese and Russian sources, this thesis argues that the original legal and official Kazakh-Qing trade established in the 1760s was gradually transformed into an unofficial Russo-Qing trade in the first half of the 19th century. Besides analyzing the motivation and the stance of the Russian empire and the Qing empire, this thesis highlights the role of individual actors such as merchants, nomads, government officials and border guards in forging the trade. This thesis also discusses the commodities in the trade, the myth of silver flow and the discovery of the dramatic price change in the year of 1840. The analysis of travelogues and quantitative archival data of the imports and exports of the Semipalatinsk custom post from the 1820s to the 1840s complement the existing scholarship on this topic. By discussing the above-mentioned themes, the author reaches the conclusion that the pre-Treaty era unofficial trade was already marked by established institutions and diverse commodities, though with a high degree of informality. The 1851 Treaty of Kuldja which officialized the Russo-Qing trade in Ili and Tarbagatai did not establish a new trade, but was a result of the pre-Treaty period unofficial trade and carried many characteristics of the pre-treaty era trade.
Internal Advisers: Nikolay Tsyrempilov & Clare Griffin
External Adviser: Prof. Erika Monahan, University of New Mexico
Advisers: Caress Schenck & Saltanat Akhmetova
The waste management system in Astana: The social hierarchy and self-perception among the employees of waste management sector
Advisers: Zohra Ismail Beben & Paula Dupuy
Advisers: Gabriel McGuire & Meiramgul Kussainova
16:00-16:30
Adel Kudaibergenova
Elderly Women in Kazakhstan: Ageing Experience and Popular Representations
Advisers: Sofiya An & Erika Alpert
On Wednesday 25th April at 16.00 Aigerim Kagarmanova will be defending her thesis in a viva-voce examination. The viva is public and all are welcome to attend.
Room 8.105, School of Humanities and Social Sciences
Title:
Electronic bazaar: Social Media as a Marketplace in Contemporary Kazakhstan 
Abstract:
This study focuses on different modalities of social media trade in Kazakhstan and how sellers create trust online using platform features, personal skills and physical locations of stores associated with social media accounts. Researching this topic in Kazakhstan locates this study in a specifically interesting intersection of trade, technology, informality and trust. Social media trade is a part of electronic commerce that is new and technologically advanced type of business, however many traders work informally as they fail to meet legal norms as business registration, paying taxes and giving receipts. Just as individual traders poured to the streets in the period of perestroika, modern day small business owners have occupied social media and turned it into an electronic bazaar. As shops located at bazaars transfer their stores online, and traders learn new technology in order to increase their sales, this study challenges the notion of bazaars being static and backward. Driven by the question of trust building in a complex realm of electronic but yet informal trade, I focus on a concept of a “living account” that is coined by my ethnographic data (interviews, observations and social media content analysis). I explore different dimensions of trade both online and offline to understand how these realms are intertwined in the question of informality and trust. I argue that the “aliveness” of an account produced through regular contact allows sellers to create trust that results in a successful sale. So, as long as an account is perceived to be “living” the question of formal registration, taxes and receipts is not relevant to customers.
Internal Advisers: Aziz Burkhanov & Erika Alpert
External Adviser: Prof. Paul Manning, Trent University
Aigerim Kagarmanova, Togzhan Kalamysheva, Karina Matkarimova, and Xeniya Udod were awarded certificates of excellence at today’s ceremony. Congratulations and keep up the great work!
We are delighted to announce that Xeniya Prilutskaya from the MA class of 2016 has been accepted onto the doctoral programme at the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen with a Research Scholarship within the University’s Excellence Initiative, from October 2017 until September 2020.
Xeniya’s thesis topic will be ‘Perception of air pollution and ecological consciousness in Kazakhstan’, and she will be supervised by Dr. Jeanne Féaux de la Croix.
Congratulations to Xeniya!
On Thursday 15th June at 17.45 Dmitriy Mel’nikov will be defending his thesis in a viva-voce examination.
The viva is public and all are welcome to attend.
Room 8.322B, School of Humanities and Social Sciences
Title: Toward Russophone Super-Literature: Making Subjectivities, Spaces And Temporalities In Post-Soviet Kazakhstani Russophone Writing
Abstract: This thesis is devoted to the analysis of literary works by a number of the leading post-Soviet Russophone Kazakhstani writers: Anuar Duisenbinov, Bakhyt Kairbekov, Diusenbek Nakipov, Nikolai Verёvochkin, Il’ia Odegov and Iurii Serebrianskii. Kazakhstan is a country where Russian literature has been developing quite successfully since the collapse of the USSR. There has been a transformation of writing in Russian in Kazakhstan since the country’s independence – with the rise of the new generation of the writers in the 2000s, Russian literature in Kazakhstan transformed into Russophone Kazakhstani literature. In this thesis, I argue for the difference between the younger and older generations of the contemporary Russophone Kazakhstani writers – the latter is focused on post-traumatic sense of loss and absence, while the former is characterized by a more positive identification concentrated on the new national post-independent realities of Kazakhstan. The concept of Russophone super-literature fits most the younger generation of the authors. The main argument of the thesis is that Russophone Kazakhstani literature is a supralinguistic and supracultural realm where complex subjectivities of Russophone Kazakh-ness, “other” Russian-ness and Kazakhstani-ness are produces and expressed. While increasing their community, the younger writers reconsider the imperial and colonial aspects of Russian-ness, incorporate (Russian-Kazakh) bilingualism, keep pace with literary modernity, accumulate their international literary capital and seek for independence from the political and nationalizing agendas of both Kazakhstan and Russia. Despite its growing importance, post-Soviet Russophone Kazakhstani literature is almost unexplored in English-language scholarship. While relying on textual analysis of prose and poetry as well as on in-depth interviews with the Kazakhstani writers, I conclude that now Russophone Kazakhstani literature demonstrates a high degree of vitality, first of all by nurturing new generations of Russophone writers in the Almaty Open Literary School; however, the bright possible future of the literature should not be overestimated, because of a number of problems such as poor national book market, the lack of audience and the continuing de-Russification of the country.
Internal Advisers: Victoria Thorstensson, Alima Bissenova & Gabriel McGuire
External Adviser: Prof Rossen Djagalov, New York University
On Wednesday 10th May from 15.00 two students from the MA in Eurasian Studies will be defending their theses in a viva-voce examination. The vivas are public and all are welcome to attend.
Room 8.322B, School of Humanities and Social Sciences
15.00 – 15.45 Saltanat Boteu
‘The Perception of Volunteering Experiences of Young Volunteers in Kazakhstan’
This thesis focuses on volunteering as a modern phenomenon that has emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union in Kazakhstan. The volunteering phenomenon has been neglected by social science research in Kazakhstan. Therefore, this study was undertaken to investigate the emergence of volunteering as a new unexplored social process. Particularly, I explore how perceptions of young volunteers form during their volunteering experience, that helps to understand the position of volunteer in Kazakhstani society. This thesis heavily relies on interviews with volunteers and key informants. In addition, I review the laws of Kazakhstan related to non-governmental and non-profit sector that indirectly touches upon volunteering and the recent Draft Law on volunteering (June 16, 2015). The thesis includes the opinions of experts, volunteers and government representatives on volunteers’ position and volunteering phenomenon in Kazakhstan. I explored the notion of volunteering in Kazakhstan, the opinions of participants on their motivations and the benefits from volunteering, the main issues that influence perception and motivation of volunteers in relationships with other actors (society, the state, volunteering organisation). The contribution of the study is the model of the relationships of volunteers with other actors, illustrating how the relationship between volunteers and the state, society and volunteering organisations are important for the volunteering sphere overall.
Internal advisers: Sofiya An & Zbigniew Wojnowski
External adviser: Professor Azamat Junisbai, Pitzer College
15.45 – 16.30 Aliya Tazhibayeva
‘The Internationalisation of Higher Education in Post-Soviet Kazakhstan: State Policies and Institutional Practices?’
This thesis deals with the interpretation and implementation of the internationalisation of higher education in Kazakhstan at national and institutional levels. The goal of the study is to find out how internationalisation of higher education is defined in the national policy documentation and in universities’ development strategies on education, how that interpretation is similar/different to those appearing in academic literature, and how it is reflected in the universities’ practices of internationalisation. As the research results illustrate, national and state higher education institutions in Kazakhstan are dependent on state policies in terms of internationalisation, though some freedom is given to universities in academic mobility and international cooperation, and limited by governmental funding for internationalisation activities. Kazakhstani universities plan and implement only the feasible elements of internationalisation, thus minimising the risk of failure.
Internal Advisers: Sofiya An & Jack Lee (GSE)
External Adviser: Professor Martha Merrill, Kent State University
Eurasian Studies at NU 