NEW CASI DIRECTOR

June 15, 2012

Dear CASI Community,

We would like to introduce the new director of CASI as well as briefly report on upcoming CASI events.

It is a pleasure to introduce Dr. Svetlana Jacquesson of the Centre for Interdisciplinary studies of Martin Luther University in Halle, Germany, who will become director of CASI starting August 1, 2012. Svetlana has been here in Bishkek for several weeks and we had several meetings already. I think CASI and AUCA will greatly benefit from having Svetlana.

Svetlana holds a PhD in ethnology (2000) from the National Institute of Oriental Languages and the High School for Social Sciences in Paris, France. After her PhD she was first elected a research fellow at the French Institute for Central Asian Studies in Tashkent, Uzbekistan (2000-2003), then a senior research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany (2006-2009). Since 2010, she has been a VolkswagenStiftung grant holder at the Centre for Interdisciplinary studies of Martin Luther University in Halle, Germany. In her  research activities she has been exprimenting with various approaches towards “identification” and “categorization” as crucial social and political phenomena. Within this common frame, she has been working on the use of hunting birds among Kyrgyz and Kazakhs and the importance of local knowledge in identity constructions, on the past and present of pastoralism in northern Kyrgyzstan and on genealogy- and history-making in post-independent Kyrgyzstan. All through her research career, she has been also variously involved in organizing and supervising research activities and junior scholars.

CASI is also finalizing the list of participants for the second annual CASI conference, scheduled for 28-29 September 2012. This year we had about 55-60 proposals, and hope to bring about 15-18 to the conference. In the meantime we have posted some papers from the last year conference as well the Soviet legacy workshop (organized with active help from John Schoeberlein) as working papers on our website, and hope the number will grow.

Special thanks to Eugene Huskey, Madeleine Reeves, Suhnaz Yilmaz and Ed Schatz for help with the review of faculty research grant proposals. We have three projects running now, on migration, Kyrgyz in China and Tabligi Jamaat. More can be found on the website, and we hope we will have more chances to support research projectsdeveloped by our faculty members. All grants cover the costs related to the field research.

More on these and other activities can be found at http://www.auca.kg/en/casi/.

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