This study explores readjustment experiences of Azerbaijani scholars returning home after doctoral study abroad. More specifically, it offers insights on how the returnees navigate structural challenges and exercise agency in the process of reintegration into the national academic system. Using a narrative inquiry approach combined with Giddens' structuration theory, the study analyses data from ten interviews to gain insights into returnees' professional adjustment, institutional engagement and knowledge production. The findings of the study reveal several systemic barriers, such as bureaucratic nostrification procedures, misalignment of employment opportunities with doctoral expertise, under-resourced research environments, and high teaching and administrative workloads. Returnees also face global knowledge hierarchies that marginalize Azerbaijani research. Despite these constraints, the participants of the study demonstrate agentic behaviours. They proactively maintain international collaborations, invest in mentoring talented students, initiate reforms and assume administrative roles to influence change. The study concludes that returnees act as both products and agents of structural transformation. It recommends nostrification policy reforms, provision of financial and managerial research support for returnees, and stimulating the establishment of alumni networks to enhance the returnees' contributions to educational transformation and localized knowledge production.
This article explores the emotional dynamics shaping ideological change in post-Soviet Kazakhstan through the lens of school ethnography. It examines the intense conflicts between the last Soviet generation of teachers and the first post-Soviet generation of parents. The conflict between teachers and parents appears to be a predictable class struggle set against the backdrop of market transition and ideological change. And a deeper analysis of emotionally charged incidents in a Russian-medium state school in Almaty reveals that the process of shaping new moralities remains embedded in existing feeling rules, demonstrating a degree of intergenerational continuity within an authoritarian regime. This paper highlights the psychological and agentive dimensions of social change in post-Soviet contexts.
This study examines the articulation of nationhood and national identity narratives in the Watandusti (patriotism) textbooks of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan (2001-2021). Applying Benedict Anderson's theory of 'imagined community', alongside Norman Fairclough's critical discourse analysis (CDA), this study examines three Dari-language Watandusti textbooks (Years 7-9, published 2017-2019). The findings reveal a blended narrative of nationhood characterized by a hybrid conceptualization of language community belonging (membership in the Quranic script-language community (Ummah) rather than a pure vernacular readership community), human loyalty (a hierarchical system of loyalty that subordinates republican popular sovereignty to divine sovereignty and traditional norms and institutions) and temporality (an Islamic eschatology mixed with an essentialist national history). This hybridity is observable in the manipulation of both traditional Islamic and modern republican discourses. Despite this blending, the textbook narrative suffers from a lack of dialogicality toward diverging religious and political worldviews.
In this research note, I reflect on how my positionality as a Tajik woman researcher shaped both my access to and interpretation of the Tajik-Kyrgyz border conflict. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in 2024-2025, I show how gendered kinship networks enabled access to local narratives while simultaneously exposing the constraints - surveillance, fear and politicized silence - that structure what can be said and recorded. Based on oral-history interviews with female Tajik interlocutors, I demonstrate that the conflict cannot be reduced to a 'water war'. Instead, these narratives reveal a multiplicity of situated interpretations, as well as a dimension largely absent from official accounts: the coexistence of conflict and everyday interdependence, expressed through practices of care, exchange and mutual vigilance. By foregrounding these gendered and relational dynamics, in this note I explain both the absence and the partial, fragile nature of Tajik-side accounts in existing scholarship on the Tajik-Kyrgyz border conflict.
