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Paper abstract:

In the last 30 years, Almaty has been undergoing urbanization due to internal emigration, regional immigration, suburbanization, and major changes in the population’s economic activities. While Kazakhstan has discursively pursued numerous (and operationalized some) reform priorities since 1991, concomitantly, ongoing protests have demonstrated broader social discontent with the lack of depth and breadth of the reforms. This received global attention recently with the events of January 2022, with the media discourse focusing on the ever-widening socio-economic gaps throughout the country. At the macro-level, this is seen by trends in its Gini coefficient, which measures overall social inequality. Kazakhstan’s Gini coefficient decreased from 0.41 (2001) to 0.29 (2009) (World Bank, 2012) with that downward trend continuing until 2015. However, since 2016, it has been trending upward to 0.278 (2018). At a micro-level, pre-existing disparities between different populations have become more apparent and new patterns of social and spatial inequality have been emerging.

This paper will be building on a survey that was first conducted in 2014–2015 across 29 schools and distributed among 2,952 secondary students. The authors concluded in subsequent papers that although the results of the survey were not generalizable, associative relationships emerged in relation to gender, family structure, and district (school location) to issues of education access and broader social (in)equity. The objective of this paper is to further examine the way education both captures and fosters socioeconomic stratification due to the bevy of values and aims that are, to some extent, paradoxical, e.g., promoting and privileging one nationality over others while promoting a cohesive civic identity and promoting social integration and provide a more robust conceptual framework for the study.

More broadly, in the Kazakhstani context, education research in and on post-Soviet Kazakhstani context has and continues to focus primarily on the challenges and changes in macro-level policy and planning processes, e.g., the role of donor agencies in the development of its education system after independence, teacher reform, with a particular emphasis on higher education. Thus, the aim of this project is to examine micro-level attributes that could serve as everyday indicators for socioeconomic status and by extension, which could provide insight into growing socioeconomic stratification in Kazakhstan.