Academic Spotlight: Dr Diana Kudaibergenova

What brought you to work at SSEES?

I have always been excited about SSEES and its interdisciplinary approach to studying the region, critically rethinking area studies, and our theorization. While a student at Cambridge, I was a regular visitor to Masaryk’s room for seminars and workshops, and coming here felt like coming to the institution and community where everyone understands what you do. My doctoral fieldwork was very interdisciplinary and multi-cited; I lived in Riga, Kyiv, Almaty and Astana, with frequent visits to Tashkent and Bishkek as well as Tallinn and Prague to collect more contextual data to drive my questions of postsovietness and post-independent nation-building.

As you can imagine, my comparative approach between the Baltic States and Central Asia often perplexed academic communities at faraway conferences where the “tradition” was to compare two neighbouring states – Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, Latvia and Estonia, but rarely to do so across different regions. Once, at the conference on Central Eurasia (where I fought for the inclusion of Ukraine and Crimea even before the war), one of my discussants asked me why I didn’t consider comparing Kazakhstan to Venezuela since Latvia was an “odd comparative case”. I disagreed so much because my work with Latvia continues to inspire and teach me so much. It was one of the best fieldwork experiences of my career.

Whenever I came to SSEES to talk about my fieldwork, I felt like no one was questioning my choice of comparisons. I felt like I was at home where I could always find incredibly knowledgeable people who knew as much about Narva as they did about Nukus, Ashgabat or Daugavpils. SSEES was an intellectual home for me even before I came here this year as a Lecturer in Central Asian Politics and Society. I am very happy to be here, and I am very excited about all the projects I’ll be working on with my colleagues and students.

If you weren’t working in academia, what would be your dream job?

Ever since I can remember, I wanted to be a writer. I am still fascinated by the magic of writing and creative writing, in particular. While doing research for my first book, Rewriting the Nation in Kazakh Literature, I was very lucky to meet with a number of notable Central Asian writers and interview them about their processes and often about their memories of living and working in the Soviet Union. I also worked with the archives of the Kazakh Union of Writers and many archives of other institutions that were related to Soviet cultural production. I am very passionate about academia and what it can do, so I am happy about my professional choices. However, my true first love is creative writing.

Can you tell us a bit about your current role and what you were doing before you arrived here?

I am very excited about my current role, as a new Lecturer of Central Asian Politics and Society I plan to develop a strong wider Central Asia teaching and research program. Before joining SSEES I was a Lecturer in Political Sociology at Cambridge, before that I was a postdoc at the Sociology of Law department in Lund, in Sweden and a Visiting Sociology Professor in Ashgabat.

Outside of work, how do you unwind?

I love spending time with my friends. When in Almaty, Bishkek, Tashkent or Bukhara, I attend poetic evenings, talk a lot with the local artistic community, attend exhibitions and art studios and discuss artistic works-in-progress. A lot of my friends in Central Asia are part of the local art and music scene, so I enjoy attending decolonial readings and workshops during the day, as well as DJ sets in the evening. I also enjoy hiking and spending time in the mountains because I grew up in a very mountainous part of Central Asia. I try to read a lot. My friends always have good suggestions for non-academic books. At the moment, I am reading Carmen Maria Machado’s short stories and her memoir, as well as a classic novel by a Turkmen writer, Berdi Kerbabayev. I also spend some of my free time working on a podcast about Central Asian decolonial thought called YurtJurt (in English) and O’dekolon podcast (in Russian), writing short stories and watching old art house films.

If you could recommend only one book, what would it be?

It is so hard to choose one because there are so many genres, themes and important works that were produced just last year! I really enjoyed reading Togzhan Kassenova’s Atomic Steppe: How Kazakhstan Gave Up the Bomb about the nuclear testing sites in Semipalatinsk. It is a very challenging narrative, but Togzhan managed to write this grim history with so much care for the survivors and gave them a lot of space where, in official narratives, they remain only in the background. I think it is one of the most important books for contemporary Central Asian and post-Soviet studies to date.

In terms of literary works, there is a good collection of short stories from Kazakhstan called “Amanat” and my favourite book of poems written by my friend, Anuar Dyussenbinov “Рухани Кенгуру” that critiques authoritarian tendencies in Kazakhstan. Both of these literary books offer very interesting experiments with the Russian language in their own way. Amanat combines Qazaq, Russian and mixed-language narratives translated into English and Anuar Dyussenbinov is known for his virtuoso combination of Russo-Qazaq verses. The title, “Рухани Кенгуру”, is a changed version of the state program “Rukhani Zhangyru” (Spiritual Enlightenment from Kazakh). The book forms a music album available on Spotify and a video accompanied by the political art of Saule Dyussenbina on YouTube. “Рухани Кенгуру” is now a classic of protest poetry in Kazakhstan. Above all, I think that both of these works are a testament to a potential decolonization of the Russian language in Kazakhstan.

If I can also suggest an art exhibition, I would highly recommend attending Aziza Kadyri’s “Spinning Tales” exhibition now open at Pushkin House. Aziza’s work and attention to Central Asian women’s experiences in migration and diaspora is truly inspiring.

What is your biggest professional achievement to date?

Wow, this is a difficult question because I am such a perfectionist. But I took some time to think of things I am proud of in my professional sphere. I know that it is important to acknowledge achievements.

First, is my ongoing engagement and work in the region where I am from. I collaborate with a lot of different initiatives and institutions in Central Asia. Every summer I try to engage in summer workshops, reading groups and discussions and throughout the year I am constantly part of online discussions, Zoom calls and institutional work.

My decade-long work with the local artistic community is a big part of my forthcoming book on Protest Art in Central Asia but is also a collective project of community-building. Over the years, we discussed, planned, and implemented a series of events and institutional work, contributed to the education programs and made a lot of spaces for collaborative cultural productions. I’ve been actively engaged in the local decolonial discussions. Right now, I am working on two long-term projects rethinking colonial narratives in socio-cultural spaces, and I hope to finalise a book on coloniality that will be published in Kazakhstan and in local languages.

Second, quite naturally, I take a lot of inspiration from fieldwork. I am always driven by the questions I ask and keep an open mind when these take me to diverse places like the Uzbek-Tajik border or, most recently, the bottom of the ancient ocean in Mangystau, where we slept in tents under the most beautiful starry skies. I am very proud of my fieldwork skills when I transform into a completely different person than I am in my daily life – I become more confident, often tireless, and not shy at all about making numerous appointments and searching for lost archives. My decision to do fieldwork in Riga for my doctorate was not spontaneous but a meticulously researched decision that often surprised people at post-Soviet conferences who questioned how Latvia could be compared to Central Asia. But I dodged every bullet of insecurity back then and had a very successful fieldwork interviewing local politicians, travelling to Daugavpils, watching the Daugava River change the scenery around it, almost losing my suitcase in the Latvian countryside, and interviewing a lot of people there. I have some of the most unforgettable memories from those fieldtrips.

After my success in Latvia, I felt like there was no limit to the possibilities and the fieldwork potential. I was very lucky to spend the best 2,5 postdoc years living in Ashgabat, and that experience completely changed how I approach my conceptual work. I am very proud of what I’ve done in Turkmenistan, where I taught sociology and social theory at the local University in English and where a lot of my students are now educators themselves. I cherish every memory from that time – how I established an academic writing group, how we read and debated about Foucault’s writings and how I spent so many weekends in the most picturesque mountains and the blooming desert in spring or how I crossed the Caspian Sea on a boat from Baku to Turkmenbashi. These are some of the most memorable and inspiring moments in my professional career to date. I wouldn’t have been there without the community of people who always helped me and without my constant urge to question and fixate on certain research puzzles. I also spent a fantastic time interviewing people all over Tajikistan and Azerbaijan in 2019, often making trips from Khorog to Baku (there is no direct flight, by the way, so it required a lot of changes and sleepless nights) or Ganja to Tashkent. I’d do it again in a heartbeat.