Ethnic Return Migration to Kazakhstan: The Case of Chinese-born Kazakhs

press release: We welcome you to the 2016 CESSI Summer Lecture Series! All lectures are free and open to the public and will be held on Tuesdays at 4pm in 206 Ingraham, except Natasha Thoreson’s July 19 lecture, which will be held in 1235 Nancy Nicholas Hall.

Join us each week for these events! (For more information on CESSI, please visit: creeca.wisc.edu/cessi)

About the Speaker:

Saltanat Akhmetova is an Instructor of Sociology at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Nazarbayev University. She received a PhD in Sociology from the University of Essex in the spring of 2016. Her dissertation examines post-return integration experiences of Kazakh repatriates in their ancestral homeland. Her research interests include Migration/Ethnicity (Policies, Settlement, Adaptation), Gender, Classical Social Theory, Qualitative Research Methods.

About the Lecture:

Kazakhstan launched an ethnic repatriation program which encouraged Kazakhs abroad to “come back home” in order to help revive Kazakh identity, culture and language, and to contribute to building an independent Kazakh state. This lecture argues that although Chinese-born Kazakhs had similar ethnicity, culture, language, and religion to the settled Kazakhs in their ancestral homeland, the returnees tended to be incorporated into different segments of the host society, which encouraged the development of their transnational practices with China, and had led to the development their own “shifted”

transnational identity as a reaction to unfavorable external environment in Kazakhstan.