CREECA Lecture Series Podcast

“Moral Future: Halal Businesses in Central Asia” with Aisalkyn Botoeva of the George Washington University LECTURE DESCRIPTION: How do people in Central Asia understand the Islamic Economy and enact its principles in their day-to-day lives? In her 18-month research in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, she explored a wide range of sites within the burgeoning Islamic Business sector, from high-visibility financial firms to small and medium-sized businesses, and all the way down to bazaars and street stalls. In this talk, she focuses on one of the key arguments of her work – that the halal business is a space of ethical inquiry, exploration, experimentation, and debate for those who decide to adopt this form of business practice. When it comes to food, for example, there is a strong belief that the consumption of halal food can lead to physical and psychological cleansing and spiritual nourishment. Along with discussions of how people understand halal, she also presents contentious cases such as the one involving kymys [fermented mare’s milk], and whether it is halal (permissible)or haram (forbidden). Moreover, ideals of what constitutes halal have spilled over to various areas of business activities that go beyond entrepreneurs’ concern with the technical aspect of food production. Some of the key debates involve questions around bribes and corruption. Entrepreneurs voice their aspirations to earn their money through adal ish (here literally halal work, but in Kyrgyz generally means work based on good intentions) and ak söz (literally white words, but connotes words of wisdom and propriety). Exploring emic ethical vocabulary and repertoires among those involved in the halal business sheds light on broader processes through which halal economy is embedded in local cultures of doing business as well as being a pious Muslim. The talk aims to give a snapshot from an ethnographic study that aims to contribute to more “top-down” accounts of Islam and the economy in the region. SPEAKER BIO: Aisalkyn Botoeva currently serves as a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for European, Russian & Eurasian Studies (IERES) of the George Washington University. She is a sociologist with broader research interests in socio-economic development, economic decision-making, and resilience in the face of uncertainty. Her past and current research experience is in topics of industrial revival in resource-poor contexts of Central Asia, entrepreneurship in the post-Soviet region, as well as the varying strategies and economic repertoires of action that entrepreneurs employ in this context. In addition to research, she taught a wide range of courses from Social Research Methods, to Globalization & Social Conflict, Leadership & Global Development both in Kyrgyzstan and the U.S. Her individual research has been funded by the Aga-Khan Foundation, Open Society Foundations as well as Hazeltine Fellowship of the Business, Organizations and Entrepreneurship Program at Brown University. The results of her individual and collaborative projects have been published in Politics & Society, Theory & Society, Families, Relationships and Societies, Post-Soviet Affairs, and Central Asian Survey among other journals.

“When is home? Exploring Kazakhstani Koreans’ notions of place and homeland” with Dr. Elise Ahn, International Projects Office, UW-Madison July 23, 2020 ABSTRACT: The collective memories of Central Asian Koreans have not been fully explored, particularly in connection to notions of “homeland” and identity. This lecture explores the linkages between participants’ family histories regarding the Korean deportation, notions of historic homeland, and participant identities regarding their “Korean-ness” through ethnographic interviews. The interview questions were based on a study looking at the lived experiences of other diasporic communities in Kazakhstan (Li Wei, 2016; Smagulova, 2016). The broader study explores questions related to issues of social mobility, socio-economic access, and identity construction among ethnolinguistic minorities in Kazakhstan. LECTURER BIO: Elise S. Ahn is the Director of the International Projects Office at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an adjunct lecturer at Edgewood College, where she teaches research methods and the internationalization of higher education in their Doctor of Education program. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (USA) in 2011 in Education Policy Studies with a concentration on Global Studies in Education and a methodological specialization in Program Evaluation. Before coming to UW–Madison, Elise worked at KIMEP University (Almaty, Kazakhstan) as an assistant professor and director of a master’s degree program in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages. Her research interests focus on the intersection of space, structures, and scale in examining the effects of internationalization in education and language policy production processes. She is also interested in issues related to language, education, and equity/access with a focus on urban contexts. She co-edited Language Change in Central Asia (with Juldyz Smagulova), which was published in 2016 and is co-editing a forthcoming special issue of World Englishes examining English in Central Asia.

CESSI Alumni Research Panel with Nick Seay and Laura Tourtellotte “Reaping the Benefits of the Harvest: Towards an Applied Approach of your Central Asian Language Skills” Speaker: Nick Seay Nick Seay shares some of his research experiences, specifically as they relate to working with the Tajik language. He then shifts the conversation to talk more concretely about ways in which language learners can target the study and use of Central Asian languages towards research and/or professional goals. Part of this talk includes Nick’s reflections after talking with several leading scholars in the field of Central Asian studies. “Deserving Daughters, Martyred Mothers: The Role of Reproductive Politics and ‘Good Women’ within Gendered Social Programs in Kazakhstan” Speaker: Laura Tourtellotte Laura Tourtellotte presents some results from her dissertation fieldwork and explores how these findings relate to the necessity of equity and context-informed interventions in social service provisioning within the contemporary reality of a global pandemic.

Dr. Madina Djuraeva talks about her 8-year long research on multilingualism among Central Asian young adults. She shares her fieldwork experience in both Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan where she collected narrative data from over 60 student participants. Dr. Djuraeva also shares a number of her key research findings around the themes of morality, belonging, and education. Madina Djuraeva defended her Ph.D. in the department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is a Lecturer of Elementary Uzbek and she has previously taught both Tajik and Uzbek languages through CESSI. Originally from Bukhara, Uzbekistan, Madina grew up in a multilingual environment of the city, which eventually contributed to her choice of profession. Her doctoral research examines lived experiences of being and becoming multilingual at the nexus of language, education, policy, and identity in the contexts of post-Soviet Central Asia and transnational migration. She has published on the issues of (non)nativeness, language policy, and morality in multilingual Central Asian communities

“An Uzbek Patron and the Limits of Eurasian Power” - Morgan Liu (The Ohio State University) Can the rich and powerful (“elites”) make society a better place? How can they transform structural problems and are there limits to what elites can accomplish for the common good? I present a case from Jalal-Abad, Kyrgyzstan where an Uzbek grand patron claimed to act for the communal good by building urban institutions serving people of all ethnicities. As a result, Uzbeks, who have experienced discrimination in Kyrgyzstan, actually flourished in this city under politically adverse circumstances for the first two decades of post-Soviet independence, until the violence of 2010 brought this Uzbek patron’s endeavors to a crashing and burning halt. We conclude with the global implications about what elites can and cannot do for the public good.

After the fall of communism, regardless of debates on the nature of systemic change, most agreed on the importance of non-violence. In this paper, I argue that the year 1989 represented a revolution in the very idea of revolution—self-limiting, non-violent, and yet far reaching in impact. However, Cold War triumphalist narratives and Western liberal mis-readings have together misrepresented the lessons and legacies of 1989, generating a “recipe-based” approach to regime change. Yet today multipolar great power politics, the soft power decline of the United States and liberal democracy more generally, an international legal regime that dis-incentivizes unpopular authoritarians to step away from power, and the moral hazard associated with the doctrine of Responsibility to Protect, have made non-violent or “1989-type” revolutions far less likely.

While recent findings suggest that violence during civil war can generate pro-social behavior, why do we often see polarization between groups based on ethnic, religious, or sectarian differences after conflict? What conditions explain why we see this in some cases, but not others? These questions matter, given that polarization complicates peacebuilding, affects post-war party politics, and may lead to a return to conflict. Presenting evidence from Bosnia, Price argues that how violence is targeted during civil war is essential to explaining the observed variation. Collective violence increases the salience of group identity while selective violence is unlikely to provoke these responses. Where these changes are widespread, they aggregate into cleavages, the social divisions which define political competition, and these results may persist well past the initial conflict.

Election forensics is a growing field of statistical techniques that can be used to detect suspicious patterns in election data. Researchers are increasingly turning to such methods to detect and evaluate potential manipulation in elections, both internationally and in the US. This lecture will present a brief overview of the state of the art, discuss the benefits and drawbacks of the election forensic approach, and then demonstrate how election forensic methods can be used to study variation in electoral manipulation at the subnational level in Russia and Ukraine. In particular, it will show how the type of election manipulation that parties employ in a territory depends both on their access to patronage resources and the degree to which they face political risks in that region.

Savelyeva explores the transformation of political culture in Russia from 2011-2019, describing a shift in attitudes toward protest, changes in the motivations and strategies of the opposition, and the burgeoning role of local activism in these movements.

Brel considers the post-communist development of the Republic of Belarus and suggests an answer to the question of why the country failed to democratize. Employing modernization theory, the presentation analyzes the connection between economic development and democracy, and between civil society and democracy. It also explores the idea that the absence of a strong national consciousness might have contributed to the country’s inability to democratize.