Cancelled - Senior Research Seminar with Dr Grace Zhou (University of Edinburgh)

Settler Socialism, Social Parasitism: Labor, Addiction, and (Dis)incorporation in Kyrgyzstan

 

Drawing on ethnographic research in southern Kyrgyzstan, my talk delves into the lives and worlds of chronically homeless and unemployed populations struggling with opioid and alcohol addiction, many of whom are descended from settlers whose families had been displaced from their homelands and resettled in Central Asia by the Soviet state. I take their family histories and life stories as an entry point to thinking of the Soviet Union as a settler colonial project which violently displaced and resettled populations on a massive scale, producing and reinscribing ethnic and racial differences. The Muslim republics of Central Asia were primary sites of state-sponsored resettlement—from the forced sedentarisation of indigenous nomadic populations and land development projects like the Virgin Lands campaign, to the relocation of skilled labourers from across the Union and the exile and resettlement of groups like Tatars and Koreans. Through the lifeworlds of marginalized and disincorporated groups in Kyrgyzstan, I explore how regimes of labour facilitated the recognition and incorporation of both indigenous and settler populations across Soviet Central Asia, creating a differential system that gave rise to ethnicised and racialized ideas of value and deservedness.

 

Grace H. Zhou is a Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. Her research explores transnational intimacies, care and precarity in late capitalist and postsocialist contexts, and the mobility of settler colonial formations, with a focus on post-Soviet Central Asia. She is also the author of the poetry chapbook Soil Called a Country, selected for Newfound’s 2023 Emerging Poets Series, which questions what it means to be an immigrant in a settler colonial nation through a speculative poetics.

 

Please note this event has been cancelled due to illness.