ethnicity, identity,  conflict, political economy, economic anthropology

 Central Asia, Kazakhstan

Indira Alibayeva obtained her B.A. in Kazakh language and literature (2010) and M.A. in Cultural Sciences (2013) from Al-Farabi Kazakh National University, Almaty. As of September 2013 Indira Alibayeva is a PhD candidate at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. She is a researcher in the larger project entitled “Ethnic Differentiation, Interethnic Relations and Conflict in Central Asia: The Case of the Uzbeks in Kyrgyzstan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and Kazakhstan”, which is a collaboration with the University of Zurich. She spent one year of intensive training at both institutions, during which she took several courses on anthropological theory and methods. During the same period she has also been teaching an introductory course on Kazakh language for two semesters at the University of Zurich. In the summer of 2014 she began her ethnographic fieldwork on Uzbeks in southern Kazakhstan, which  has now been completed.