From a Neighborhood in Bishkek to Translocal Business-Making across Eurasia: Insights from Two Ethnographic Writing Endeavors

From a Neighborhood in Bishkek to Translocal Business-Making across Eurasia: Insights from Two Ethnographic Writing Endeavors

Mon 30 Nov 2020 6:30pm8:00pm

Venue

Room: 
Online zoom meeting

You are cordially invited to a Zoom seminar given by Dr. Philipp Schröder from the University of Freiburg at 6:30pm-8:00pm on Monday 30 November (Brisbane time). The seminar is titled From a Neighborhood in Bishkek to Translocal Business-Making across Eurasia: Insights from Two Ethnographic Writing Endeavors. This seminar is the fifth session of a workshop led by Yang Zhao, an anthropology PhD student in our school. The workshop is funded by the U21 Researcher Resilience Fund.

 

From a Neighborhood in Bishkek to Translocal Business-Making across Eurasia: Insights from Two Ethnographic Writing Endeavors

 

Dr. Philipp Schröder

Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology

The University of Freiburg, Germany

 

Date: Monday, 30 November 2020

Time: 6:30-8:00 (Brisbane time)

Location: Online zoom meeting, please register through https://uqz.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZMpf-ugrjwuGNJL2nCZ4M8z1BXllHwiA7pF

 

Abstract

The lecture will reflect on the insights - empirical, methodological, epistemic and else - that Philipp Schröder gained from his two major attempts at ethnographic writing. The one book, entitled ‘Bishkek Boys’, is based on 18 months of stationary fieldwork in Kyrgyzstan’s capital and aspired to grasp urban change through the eyes of young males and their praxis of integration and identification. The other is a forthcoming manuscript that draws on multi-sited fieldwork among Kyrgyz traders, middlemen and entrepreneurs in-between ‘home’, Russia and China in order to understand the translocal evolution and positioning of Kyrgyzstan’s first generation of post-Socialist capitalists.

 

A rough outline prepared by Philipp Schröder is as below:
- Intro (How I started and what I have done in Kyrgyzstan/Central Asia) - 5 minutes
- Bishkek Boys (The research, its background and what it is about) - 20 minutes
- Kyrgyzstan’s First Capitalist Generation between Russia, China and “Home” (This is the book manuscript which I am working on right now, which looks at post-Socialist translocal entrepreneurialism in the wider sense) - 20 minutes
- Writing Ethnographies - 15 minutes

 

About the speaker

Philipp Schröder studied Cultural/Social Anthropology and Political Sciences at the University of Tübingen, the Free University Berlin and the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. In October 2017, Philipp Schröder joined the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Freiburg as a postdoctoral researcher, lecturer and coordinator of the BA program. Philipp Schröder's research interests are identity, integration and conflict; translocal mobilities and entrepreneurialism; urban spaces, youth (cultures) and masculinities. His research areas are Central Asia and Eurasia (in particular Kyrgyzstan, Russia and China).

 

About the workshop

COVID-19 is fundamentally changing academic research landscape. Humanities and social sciences, relying heavily on fieldwork for data collection, are particularly hit hard by the pandemic. The cessation of travel opportunities brought by international or domestic travel bans and limitations has forced many researchers to either change, postpone, or even cancel their original research plans. As a group of social science PhD students from U21 universities, we are launching a Social Sciences Online Writing Workshop to self-empower ourselves by innovatively refreshing research skills and writing collaboratively and inter-disciplinarily. 

Contacts