Madeleine Reeves (RCUK Fellow)
Research interests
My research interests focus broadly on the relationship between the classificatory technologies through which citizens and non-citizens are produced, and the lived experience of being subject to the state’s authority, particularly in settings where normative understandings of state provision have been transformed by economic collapse. I am interested in the emotional and affective dimensions of this relationship and the ways in which particular state places (borders, checkpoints, administrative offices…) come to be produced as sites of intimacy and fear. During my doctoral research, a study of the everyday work entailed in “bordering” the state between post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan in the Ferghana valley, I explored the interactions between border-guards, customs officers, traders, herders and border-crossing ferrymen through which a juridical boundary is practically enacted. In so doing, I have sought to take the production and contestation of the state’s “territorial integrity” as an anthropological problem, looking at the work involved in “bounding” the state, and the meanings of becoming separate in a region of intense historical inter-dependence. This is a theme that I am developing in a panel on “territorial integrity” for the forthcoming CRESC conference, and through my membership of EastBordNet , a network of scholars conducting research on gender, money and borders at Europe’s “Easts”. I am also working on a book manuscript based on my dissertation research, with the tentative title Border Work: Materialising the State at its Margins in Rural Central Asia.
The new project on which I have embarked since coming to Manchester, Unbecoming citizens: subjectivity and the negotiation of “law” in a Moscow migrant community develops from my previous interest in the ethnography of the state. This project, which will involve fieldwork in and between southern Kyrgyzstan and Moscow in 2009-10, is a study of the history and current functioning of the system of internal residence registration used for regulating movement within the Soviet Union, which lives on, in different ways, in several post-Soviet states including Russia. It is the contemporary navigation of this system by labour migrants from Kyrgyzstan in Moscow that I plan to focus ethnographically, using this as a way of exploring the documentary production of migrant “illegality”, the lived experience of being “before the law”, and the complex blurring of state and society in interactions between low-ranking state officials and those whose movement they nominally regulate.
Alongside these theoretical interests in the anthropology of the state and the technologies through which state spatiality is produced, I have a longstanding interest in the reconfiguration of social scientific knowledge in Central Asia after socialism, and growing interest in issues of conceptual translation between Anglophone and Russophone anthropology. I have published on the impact of market reforms on secondary and higher education in Kyrgyzstan and have developed a Resource Book for teachers of the Humanities in Central Asia, published by Aga Khan Trust for Culture in 2007. I have previously taught at Batken State University, the American University – Central Asia and the University of Cambridge. With Nina Bagdasarova and Gulnara Ibraeva, I currently co-direct a three year collaborative academic project on Nationhood and Narrative in Central Asia: History, Context, Critique, funded by the Higher Education Support Program of the Open Society Institute.
Recent publications
Co-authored book
- 2006. Surviving the Transition? Case Studies of Schools and Schooling in the Kyrgyz Republic since Independence. Co-authored with Alan De Young and Galina Valyayeva. Greenwich, CT: Information Age Publishers.
Articles
- Forthcoming. “Materialising state space: ‘creeping migration’ and territorial integrity in southern Kyrgyzstan.” Europe-Asia Studies (Special Issue on the Politics of the Spectacular in Central Asia)
- 2008. “Materializing Borders”. Anthropology News, Vol. 49 (5), pp. 12-13
- 2008. “Ethnicity, language and categories of analysis in N. Kosmarskaya’s Deti imperii v post-sovetskoi tsetral’noi Azii”, Etnograficheskoe obozrenie, 2008, No. 2, pp. 24-29 (in Russian)
- 2007. “Unstable objects: corpses, checkpoints and “chessboard borders” in the Ferghana valley.” Anthropology of East Europe Review, Vol. 25 (1), pp. 72-84 (Special Issue on The Movement of Goods and Identities Within and Beyond the Former Socialist World)
- 2005. “Locating danger: konfliktologiia and the search for fixity in the Ferghana Valley borderlands.” Central Asian Survey, Vol. 24 (1), pp. 67-81 (Special Issue on Discourses of Danger in Central Asia)
- 2005. “Of Credits, Kontrakty and Critical Thinking: Encountering “Market Reforms” in Kyrgyzstani Higher Education.” European Education Research Journal, Vol.4 (1), pp. 5- 21
- 2004. “Academic integrity and its limits in Kyrgyzstan’s higher education: a view from the margins.” International Higher Education 35, pp. 36-39
Book chapters
- 2007. “Travels in the margins of the state: everyday geography in the Ferghana Valley borderlands.” In Jeff Sahadeo and Russell Zanca (eds), Everyday Life in Central Asia Past and Present. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, pp. 281-300
- 2003. ‘Cultivating Citizens of a New Type? The Politics and Practice of Educational Reform at the American University in Kyrgyzstan’. In Alan De Young and Steve Heynman (eds.), Challenges of Education in Central Asia. Greenwich (CT):Information Age Publishers, pp. 365-385
Teaching resource
- 2007. Introduction to Humanities: A Resource Book for Teachers. Dushanbe: Aga Khan Trust for Culture
Book, film and conference reviews
- Forthcoming. Review of Keebet von Benda-Beckmann and Fernanda Pririe (eds), Order and Disorder: Anthropological Perspectives. Oxford: Berghahn, 2007. Anthropological Notebooks
- 2009. Review of David Lewis, The Temptations of Tyranny in Central Asia. London: Hurst Publishers, 2008. Nationalities Papers, Vol. 38 (2)
- 2008. Review of Sarah Amsler, The Politics of Knowledge in Central Asia: Science Between Marx and the Market. London: Routledge, 2007. Central Asian Survey, Vol. 27 (3/4): 379-382
- 2008. Film review of Marat Alykulov, Chek ara/Granitsa [The Borders]. Bishkek: Oy-Art Productions, 2006. Central Asian Survey, Vol. 27 (2): 27-29
- 2007. Report on the Central Asian Workshop for Doctoral and Post-Doctoral Students, Paris, France October 26-27th 2007. In Central Eurasian Studies Review, Vol. 16 (1/2): 34-38, 2007 (with Olivier Ferrando)
- 2007. Review of Mathijs Pelkmans, Defending the Border: Identity, Religion and Modernity in the Republic of Georgia, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007. In Anthropological Notebooks, XIII (2): 155-157, 2007
- 2006. Review of Sarah Green, Notes from the Balkans. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005. In Cambridge Anthropology, March 2006
In progress
Border Work: Materialising the State at its Margins in Rural Central Asia (book manuscript)
Contact Details
ESRC Centre for Research on
Socio-Cultural Change (CRESC)
178 Waterloo Place
The University of Manchester
Oxford Road
Manchester M13 9PL
UK
tel: +44 (0)161 275 8994
email: Madeleine.reeves@manchester.ac.uk