"Uyghur Neighborhoods and Nationalisms in Kazakhstan"

Sean R. Roberts, PhD, Director of the International Development Studies Program and Associate Professor of Practice at George Washington University

Date and time: August 7th at 4:00 P.M.
Location: 2270 Grainger Hall

Sponsor:Center for Russia, East Europe, and Central Asia (CREECA),the Central Asian Studies Program, and the Middle East Studies Program, with funding from the University Lectures Committee.

This lecture is part of the Central Eurasian Studies Summer Institute Summer Lecture Series.

About the lecture: With the fall of the Soviet Union, the Uyghurs of Kazakhstan, like many others in the former USSR, began to resurrect and re-invent traditional cultural practices that had been repressed during the Soviet period as either contrary to socialist atheism or as remnants of a “feudal past.”  These traditions included daily practices and rituals based in local communities as well as the informal structure of neighborhood governance that regulates such practices.  Since the 1990s, the importance of these neighborhood structures and practices to Uyghur daily life in Kazakhstan have gradually increased, and most recently the informal structure of neighborhood governance has even been scaled up to create a Republic-wide organization that represents Uyghur interests to the government of Kazakhstan.  In this lecture, Dr. Roberts examines the role of these neighborhoods in the national identity of the Uyghurs of Kazakhstan, emphasizing how they serve as social fields in which national identity and its representation can be negotiated, constructed, and reproduced.

About the speaker: Sean R. Roberts, PhD is the Director of the International Development Studies program and an Associate Professor of Practice at George Washington University’s Elliott School for International Affairs. He has spent significant time conducting research in Uyghur communities in both Central Asia and China and is the author of numerous articles, book chapters, and a documentary film on the Uyghurs of the Kazakhstan-China borderland.  In addition, he has been active in the field of democracy development in Central Asia where he worked for USAID for over six years.  He earned his Masters degree in Visual Anthropology and his Doctorate in Social Anthropology at the University of Southern California.  He is presently writing a book about the Uyghurs of the Ili Valley borderlands between China and Central Asia.

 

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