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- Convenor:
-
Christopher Baker
(American University of Central Asia)
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- Discussant:
-
Gabriel McGuire
(Nazarbayev University)
- Format:
- Panel
- Theme:
- Literature
- Location:
- Room 3038
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 17 June, -
Time zone: KZT
Abstract
This panel examines issues of authority in the Kazakh context and the different forms of representation that construct, contest, and mediate it. Moving between lineage, festival, and archive, it interrogates how legitimacy is constituted, or questioned, through narrative, performance, and classification. Dinara Seksembayeva’s paper examines these issues in a post-Mongol imperial context in which older forms of steppe legitimacy began to falter or tremble. Focusing on Kazakh iterations of the Edige epic, she highlights its depictions of father-son ruptures and competition for Chinggisid daughters, arguing these were attempts to give narrative form to a changing landscape of prestige and political power. Gulzada Xan’s presentation relocates these concerns to the Soviet context and to the festival of Nauryz, a tradition originally reintroduced in the late Soviet era as a national form through which to display and disseminate Soviet authority. Her paper examines how Kazakh literary figures contested this legitimacy and the ways in which they reframed it as the recovery of an authentic Kazakh heritage. Shifting the focus to the steppe and to questions of epistemic authority, Christopher Baker’s paper examines the classifications of Chokan Valikhanov and a later generation of Soviet artists who used or repurposed pieces of his erudition to make the steppe legible. an engagement that in moments undermined the authority they attributed to his taxonomic precision. To engage his classifications, or to reflect on them in art, also meant confronting the question of whether the steppe was legible at all and if there was any authentic relationship between tables, lists, and lived experience.
Accepted papers
Session 1 Wednesday 17 June, 2026, -Abstract
The epic of Edige is a widely shared epic tradition among various Turkic communities, including Kazakhs, which narrates the story of Edige, the legendary founder of the Noghay Horde. As a rich performative tradition, Edige has attracted the attention of scholars of oral literature, history, religion, such as Karl Reichl, Victor Zhirmunsky, and Devin DeWeese, who have examined the epic’s historical depth and performative elements. However, one central narrative motif, namely recurring father-son conflicts, has received little scholarly attention. This paper examines this theme in Kazakh versions of Edige, focusing on the rupture between Edige and his son Nuraly. In several variants, their feud frequently arises from Edige’s broken promise to give Nuraly one of the daughters of Tokhtamysh, a ruler of Chinggisid descent. While on the surface this episode dramatizes the consequences of failed paternal obligations, such as the distribution of war spoils, it simultaneously reveals broader political anxieties surrounding legitimacy and succession in the post-Mongol imperial context. The conflict becomes especially meaningful when viewed in relation to the institution of guregen, the political status of sons-in-law to the Chinggisid lineage. In the successor states of the Mongol empire, including the Golden Horde, marriage into the ruling family became one of the official pathways through which non-Chinggisid elites could acquire authority and secondary legitimacy. For Edige and his kin, access to Chinggisid daughters symbolized entry into the symbolic capital of Chinggisid prestige. Within this framework, the rivalry between Edige and Nuraly can be interpreted as a feud over access to political authority. Since the epic of Edige functions as “exculpatory narratives,” as Thomas Welsford argues, it provides Edige with alternative forms of legitimacy. The recurring presence of daughters of Tokhtamysh implicitly acknowledges the continuing political supremacy of Chinggisid descent and the need for such legitimacy among non-Chinggisid elites. Drawing on several Kazakh epic variants, including Edige Zhyr, Er Edige, Edige Batyr Angimesi, and Maulimniyaz-Edige, the paper argues that father-son conflicts centered on Tokhtamysh’s daughters acquire a clear political meaning, reflecting anxieties over access to Chinggisid legitimacy rather than merely disputes over broken promises.
Abstract
Educational reform in post-Soviet contexts is often framed through deficit narratives that cast local legacies as impediments to Western modernity. This paper challenges such framings by utilising a third-space lens to analyse how Kazakh language teacher educators navigate the structural constraints of state-mandated reform. We used a multimodal phenomenological approach involving five experienced Kazakh language teacher educators as research collaborators. Our methodology utilized three distinct registers of engagement: questionnaires featuring comic strips, the “Significant Circles” visual mapping tool, and dialogic interviews using metaphorical image cards. This approach allowed us to move beyond traditional boundaries of professional discourse to reveal the submerged epistemological labour of the trainers. The study provides a novel decolonial framework for understanding teacher agency by introducing “living through epistemicide” as a pathway toward epistemic freedom. Findings indicate a definitive shift from deficit discourses toward a narrative of epistemic vitality. We demonstrate how “untranslated” local pedagogical philosophies serve as vital intellectual resources for educators navigating asymmetrical knowledge systems. By mobilising these frameworks alongside imported models, educators enact a triple consciousness that resolves apparent contradictions through principled reasoning. This study unsettles global hierarchies of expertise, repositioning Kazakh teacher educators as central theorists who reclaim the right to interpret the world from their own location. Furthermore, our collaborative positionality as Kazakh and South African scholars fosters a South-South dialogue that purposefully bypasses the traditional center-periphery model of knowledge production.
Abstract
This paper analyzes how the Nauryz, a spring equinox holiday celebrated across Central
Asia became increasingly national in meaning during its revival in late Soviet Kazakhstan.
Although the holiday was reintroduced within the familiar Soviet formula that allowed national form within a socialist framework, literary figures, journalists, and editors used the revival to redefine Nauryz as part of Kazakh historical and cultural identity. Drawing on the late Soviet newspapers, poems, interviews, and archival materials, the paper shows that early media coverage framed Nauryz as a civic and ideologically acceptable celebration associated with
collective labor, ecological campaigns, and the discourse of friendship of nations, rather than as an explicitly national holiday.
At the same time, literary texts played a crucial role in the gradual nationalization of the holiday. Following Diana Kudaibergen’s argument that literature in late Soviet Kazakhstan functioned as a space for reimagining the nation, the paper examines how poets and writers used nostalgia, historical memory, and references to pre-Soviet tradition to frame Nauryz as a recovered element of Kazakh culture. Poems by Mukagali Makatayev and Mukhtar Shakhanov, as well as the republication of works by earlier figures such as Beimbet Mailin, Shakarim Kudaiberdiuly, and Mukhtar Auezov, connected the revival of the holiday to a broader process of cultural restoration. Newspapers and journals reinforced this narrative by citing earlier intellectuals, republishing historical texts, and presenting Nauryz as a tradition that had survived despite decades of official absence.
Abstract
Contemporary education research predominantly applies data-driven epistemologies, standardised indicators, widely accepted ranks and instrumental policy demands, margining ethical judgment, moral responsibility, and questions of value. This paper proceeds debates on knowing and acting by centring locally grounded ethical formation as a foundational yet under-theorised dimension of higher education. Drawing on Madhok (2020), who argued that “there are not enough concepts to capture and produce theorized accounts of different, historically specific and located forms of worldmaking in ‘most of the world” (p. 395), this paper develops the concept of Tolyq Adam (the holistic person), articulated by the Kazakh philosopher and poet Abai Kunanbayev (1845–1904), as a theory-capable educational philosophy emerging from Kazakhstan, Central Asia.
Abai’s philosophy conceptualizes human development through the integration interrelated concepts such as aqyl (reason), jürek (heart), and qayrat (will). This paper interprets these concepts as mutually constitutive dimensions of ethical formation, linking epistemic judgment, value orientation, and responsible action. Tolyq Adam offers an alternative to fragmented, performative, and competence-driven models of higher education by foregrounding education as a process of ethical self-formation.
Since 2023, this philosophy has been systematically operationalised at Almaty Management University through the Tolyq Adam program developed within the School of Transformative Humanities and Education. At the core of the program lies the LEADER framework, which articulates six interrelated capacities for contemporary higher education: lifelong learning, empathy, analytical and creative thinking, dialogue and discourse, ethics and ecology, and resilience. These principles are embedded across eight compulsory general education courses reaching over 1,000 first-year students annually. In this sense, the Tolyq Adam program operates not merely as a curricular innovation but as an institutional epistemic design that redefines the purpose of general education. Survey data from 2024–2025 indicate substantial student-reported growth across these dimensions, alongside the implementation of more than 100 student-led community projects translating ethical reflection into social action.
Methodologically, the paper employs conceptual analysis and framework synthesis within traditions of educational philosophy. First, it explicates the concept of Tolyq Adam, defining and clarifying its conceptual boundaries and epistemological assumptions while addressing risks of mistranslation and avoiding its reduction to vague or universalised notions of “holism”. Second, the analysis derives three analytically distinct yet interrelated dimensions of ethical formation: epistemic (aqyl), affective (jürek), and volitional (qayrat). These dimensions are synthesised into a conceptual framework that links ethical formation to pedagogical orientations emphasising reflexivity, moral judgment, and the translation of knowledge and values into action.
Abstract
In a 1999 interview, Qazaq Soviet writer Sara Myñjasarova (1924 - 2002) explained that she became a writer not out of inspiration, but out of dissatisfaction with how Qazaq male authors portrayed women. In their novels and povests, women appeared as passive, docile, and powerless, shaped to fit dominant political narratives. In contrast, Myñjasarova emphasized women’s historical agency, describing Qazaq women as autonomous, brave, and central to the nation’s social life. For her, writing became a means of restoring women’s dignity and challenging reductive literary representations. My paper examines Myñjasarova’s novel Tözim šeñberi (1987) to explore how knowledge about “the Qazaq woman” has been produced as uniform and ideologically constrained. It asks: how did political and literary narratives construct this singular, passive figure? What narrative strategies helped naturalize this image? And how does Myñjasarova’s novel disrupt it by reintroducing complexity, historical specificity, and alternative forms of agency? Through close textual analysis, the paper argues that Tözim šeñberi does not simply offer a counter-image of Qazaq women, but actively challenges the epistemological frameworks that have shaped gendered knowledge in Qazaq literature. In doing so, it repositions women as dynamic and heterogeneous subjects and reclaims their role in the cultural and historical imagination.