RESEARCH PROJECTS
Parasitic Intimacies: Life, Love, and Labor in the Asian Borderlands
My book manuscript explores how the lives and labors of a diverse and disparate set of Central Asian women might help us reimagine economic possibilities and socio-political futures after the decline of wage labor.
Based on over two years of ethnographic research in Kyrgyzstan funded by the National Science Foundation and the Social Science Research Council, it narrates the exploits and travails of entrepreneurial traders traveling to China and Turkey, rural migrants and undocumented women in the sex trade, and marginalized, hustling drug addicts in search of recognition. Seemingly dissimilar, these heterogeneous groups were thrown together and criminalized in the late Soviet era as “social parasites.” Today, despite the residues of stigma, these activities are the mainspring of livelihoods.
Moving from ethnographic experience of marginalization to theoretical reclamation of a stigmatized category, I analyze how the feminized and racialized figure of the parasite challenges sedimented conceptions of labor, value, and deservedness. This research advances what I call “parasitic politics,” a mode of critique and a form of everyday politics that embraces not only mutuality, but dependency.
Theorizing Settler Socialism: Land, Labor, and Power in Central Asia
This project seeks to theorize the ongoing structures of what I call “settler socialism” in Central Asia during the 20th and 21st centuries. Through continued analysis of ethnographic materials that I collected between 2013 and the present, and incorporating additional archival research as well as primary and secondary sources (news media, political rhetoric, fiction and non-fiction narratives), this project delves into China’s role in Central Asia as a settler colonial project that invokes (post-)socialist ideology as a means to legitimize its power.
Fishing in the Desert: Care and Ecological Diplomacy in the Aral Sea Basin
My next ethnographic project attends to the conjunction of environmental crisis, economic decline, and public health catastrophe in the desiccated Aral Sea basin. Within living memory, extensive irrigation projects transformed 90% of the former sea into an arid, wind-swept desert that spans the modern nation-states of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan. Building on preliminary fieldwork that I conducted in Kazakhstan’s Aral region in 2015, where an $86 million dam has “brought back” the sea, I look at the Aral Sea as a site of technocratic intervention by following inter-Asian development initiatives and cooperation between scientists, non-profits, and health workers.
RESEARCH PUBLICATIONS
“Life and Death in the Margins: Addiction, Dispossession, and Care in Kyrgyzstan,” invited book chapter in The Central Asian World, eds. Jeanne Féaux de la Croix and Madeleine Reeves, Routledge. (Forthcoming)
“Un/tracing Empire: Pollinations between the Poetic and Ethnographic” and “Erasure as Repair: A Speculative Poetics of the Archive,” in Fieldsights, Society for Cultural Anthropology.
“Epistemology as Ethics: Notes from the Asian Borderlands,” in Fieldsights, Society for Cultural Anthropology.
“Beyond (Il)liberal Elites: Thoughts on Power and Money in Central Asia,” in Post-Communist Economies, Vol. 31, Issue 4.
“Shifting Seas: The Lived Landscapes of Aral,” on The Central Eurasian Studies Society Blog.
“Essentialist Legacies and Shifting Identities: Language in Central Asian Nation-Building,” in Columbia University Journal of Politics & Society, Vol. 21.