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Abstract

Kazakhstani youth inhabit a cultural landscape shaped by Soviet legacies, post-independence nationalism, and global digital flows (Buribayev et al., 2025). Social media platforms – particularly TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube – have become arenas where competing narratives about identity, culture, and modernity circulate. While prior research has explored national identity, language ideologies, or media influence in Central Asia (Kamalova, 2025; Kurmanova et al., 2025; Lyanova, 2025; Nam & Mukhamejanova, 2025; Матжанова & Матжанова, 2023; Smagulova, 2023), very little has examined how young people cognitively negotiate competing value systems – understood here as the principles, beliefs, and priorities that shape judgments and decisions – within algorithm driven digital environments. Additional studies on youth digital media consumption, civic engagement, psychosocial values, and hybrid identity formation (British Council, 2023; Saparova et al., 2020; Sagikyzy et al., 2025; Tusupbekova et al., 2025) highlight that while youth actively engage with online content, the cognitive processes by which they reconcile local, national, and global influences remain underexplored.

Drawing on cognitive decoloniality, this study examines how young people critically reinterpret inherited epistemic frameworks and external influences in digital spaces. Cognitive decoloniality emphasizes that individuals are not passive recipients of cultural hierarchies but actively negotiate, resist, and hybridize knowledge systems, making social media a critical site for epistemic engagement. The research employs a qualitative digital discourse analysis of 100–200 publicly available posts and short videos curated using hashtags and content related to Kazakh identity, language revival, cultural traditions, and contemporary lifestyle narratives, including references to Western and Russian influences. Each post is systematically coded for themes of identity negotiation, value alignment, resistance, and hybridization, with critical discourse analysis applied to examine how language, visuals, and storytelling strategies reflect youth’s cognitive engagement with competing knowledge systems.

Preliminary findings suggest that social media operate as cognitive spaces of decolonial negotiation, where youth selectively adopt, reinterpret, or resist dominant narratives to construct hybrid value systems blending global and local meanings. The study contributes theoretically by extending cognitive decoloniality to the digital domain, highlighting the intersection of youth culture, algorithmically mediated digital spaces, and identity formation, and demonstrating that value transformation in Central Asia is actively co-constructed rather than inherited. Practically, it provides insights for media literacy programs, educational initiatives, and cultural engagement strategies, equipping youth to navigate complex digital information flows while sustaining pluralistic value frameworks.

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This paper proposes Nomadic Exchange as a methodological framework for rethinking Central Eurasia beyond nation-state logics, institutional mobility, and extractive models of cultural exchange. Drawing from ongoing Indigenous-led, artist-run collaborations between Central Asia and Native North America, the paper argues that nomadic exchange is not merely a theme or metaphor, but a living cultural infrastructure rooted in kinship, land-based knowledge, and long-term relational accountability.

Dominant approaches to Central Eurasia often frame the region through geopolitical borders, imperial histories, or post-Soviet transition narratives. While analytically useful, these frameworks frequently overlook Indigenous epistemologies that understand space as relational, mobile, and continually negotiated. This paper centers Indigenous artist-led exchange as a counter-method—one that privileges lived experience, shared labor, and mutual obligation over institutional outcomes or state-centered cultural diplomacy.

The paper draws on the author’s sustained involvement with Nomadic Exchange, an Indigenous-led initiative founded by Kyrgyz artist Shaarbek Amankul in Kyrgyzstan that fosters long-term collaboration among artists, scholars, and culture bearers from Central Asia and Indigenous communities in North America. Since 2024, the project has intentionally shifted away from international “residency” models toward a kinship-based approach grounded in shared travel, communal making, collective authorship, and ongoing return. These exchanges operate without fixed curricula or hierarchical authority, emphasizing reciprocity, trust, and care as foundational structures.

Positioning Nomadic Exchange as a method, the paper explores three interrelated dimensions:

Infrastructure – how artist-run initiatives function as alternative systems of knowledge production and circulation beyond state and academic institutions; Mobility – how Indigenous-led exchange reframes movement not as access or privilege, but as responsibility to land, community, and relationship; and Power – how lateral Indigenous solidarities unsettle dominant narratives of representation, expertise, and cultural value.

By foregrounding artists as theorists and cultural workers as method-makers, this paper challenges conventional separations between scholarship and practice. It asks how Central Eurasia might be reimagined through Indigenous relational frameworks that predate and exceed modern borders, while remaining deeply entangled with contemporary political, economic, and ecological realities.

Ultimately, the paper contributes to Central Eurasian studies by offering an Indigenous, practice-based methodology for understanding space, society, and power as dynamic processes sustained through relationships rather than governance. Nomadic Exchange is presented not as a case study to be analyzed from a distance, but as an active method through which alternative futures are continually rehearsed and enacted.

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This study examines transnational protests in Kazakhstan by Chinese women from the Uyghur and Kazakh ethnic groups to draw attention to what some scholars have described as “cultural genocide” in China’s western region of Xinjiang.

A small group of elderly and middle-aged Xinjiang women has been protesting in neighboring Kazakhstan for 600 days (2021-2024) to raise awareness about the incarceration of their relatives in the infamous Chinese “re-education camps.” The little media attention from the local Kazakh media outlets, which are also stifled by the authoritarian state, made women’s quest for greater visibility more difficult. Kazakhstan, positioned between Russia and China, is also navigating the complex geopolitical landscape cautiously, preferring to avoid supporting protesting groups and instead arresting or fining them.

The study examines news coverage by selected independent Kazakhstani media outlets in Kazakh and Russian languages and aims to conduct in-depth interviews with some Xinjiang women.

The research questions are the following:

• What frames are used in the local (Kazakh) media to represent Xinjiang women?

• How did Xinjiang women communicate to the media their cause in the social movement, and what strategies did they use to reach their goal?

• In what ways do Xinjiang women understand and experience their activism, and how do they resist the structural inequalities?

The main limitations of the study are a small sample of news items due to limited media coverage of women’s protests in Kazakhstan, and ethical considerations regarding interviews with Xinjiang women, as some of them may find the process emotionally taxing.

The preliminary findings suggest that the Kazakhstani media, in both Kazakh and Russian, reported on the women’s 600-day protests only occasionally, particularly when arrests and violence occurred, confirming the protest paradigm elements. The study also confirms the ongoing invisibility of marginalized women in media representations within social movements. Some peculiarities of local media coverage in comparison with international media coverage are discussed.

The study aims to add new empirical data on the transnational social movements of this understudied group in Kazakhstan and to deepen understanding of the disempowerment they continue to experience both in China and abroad.

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The research work is aimed at a comprehensive analysis of the economic nature of Kazakh-language content in social networks in Kazakhstan within the framework of the theory of infonomy and scientific substantiation of mechanisms for increasing its competitiveness through digital marketing strategies. The purpose of the study is to determine the information value of Kazakh-language online publications and systematically analyze the mechanisms of its monetization, models of interaction with the audience, approaches to assessing the effectiveness of content and the influence of digital platform algorithms. At the same time, the main attention is paid to the information value, distribution mechanism, models of interaction with the audience and commercial potential of the content published in the Kazakh language. The object of the study is media, bloggers and digital projects producing content in the Kazakh language on the platforms Instagram, Telegram and YouTube. As a research method, content analysis, questionnaires, and expert interviews of information and educational materials for the period from 2020 to 2025 were taken. The theory of the concept of Infonomics by D. Laney was used as a theoretical basis. As a result of the study, the features of media consumption of the Kazakh-language audience were systematized, cognitive, emotional and interactive models of content perception were proposed. In order to comprehensively assess the economic efficiency of content, the concept of the "index of intellectual and social capital" has been developed. Scientific research questions of the study:

What are the features of media consumption of the Kazakh-speaking audience and how do they contribute to the commercial success of content?

What is the information value of Kazakh-language content in domestic social networks and how to evaluate it as a cost-effective resource in the framework of the theory of Infonomics? The results of the study form a methodological basis that allows a systematic assessment of the economic potential of Kazakh-language digital content. The developed analysis model allows us to consider in an integrated way the influence of digital platform algorithms, the level of interactive communication with the audience and monetization strategies.

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The paper sheds light on Indie and Underground music scenes in Astana and Almaty based on the data collected through 56 in-depth interviews with musicians and music experts and 16 observations conducted from August 2024 until August 2025. Building on concepts of music fans as mediators (Arriagada and Cruz, 2014) and executive fans (Edlom and Karlsson, 2021), the work views local alternative musicians as musicians/music fans. It outlines the fusion of roles as an important characteristic of the music scene and acknowledges the role of fandom in developing the scene. The research outlines participatory and convergence culture (Jenkins, 2013) as facilitators that allowed musicians/music fans to create communities, independent organizations and micro labels. I demonstrate how local musicians are driven by the love for music and take on organizational responsibilities like opening venues, organizing concerts, music residencies, generating knowledge, and popularizing the scene among the audience. The work also outlines collaboration and relational labor (Baym, 2018) as strategies musicians use to enter the music scene and gain financial stability. It discusses the gender issues and power dynamics in the scene that create some challenges for female artists.