Thesiss

This dissertation is an ethnography of Kazakhstan's art world after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Drawing on fifteen months of anthropological field research in Almaty and Astana, in Kazakhstan, I inquire into the discourses and practices of aesthetic production as visual…

This dissertation examines the institutional determinants of one set of countries---the former socialist states in South East and Central Europe. It is motivated by the observation that fifteen years after the beginning of transition we see a divergence in the institutional perf…

This dissertation is based on 26 months, between 2007 and 2010, of official non-continuous ethnographic fieldwork in real estate development in Kazakhstan. During this time, I investigated the institutionalization of new housing “dreamworlds” and new modes of being urban in rela…