Aigine offers two options for affiliation: 1) Internship, 2) Visiting Researcher.
There is one intern and one visiting researchers positions per semester (up to 3 months) available.
INTERNSHIP
Duties of the intern will be related to the mission of Aigine
Aigine can provide the following:
o Invitation or support letters;
o Assistance with locating Kyrgyz/Russian language teachers;
o Assistance with locating accommodation.
o Assistance with intern’s research project.
NOTE: Aigine does not provide accommodation.
Requirements:
o Involvement in activities of Aigine such as editing, fundraising, other activities.
o Work hours of intern: 4 hours daily five days per week or 3 full-days (8 hours) per week.
Aigine cannot pay interns, and expects interns to provide administrative overhead of $50 per months.
Duration of an internship: from one to three months.
Documents for application:
o CV
o One recommendation of a professor or supervisor
VISITING RESEARCHER
Aigine can provide the following:
o Affiliation with the center;
o Office space (a desk, computer with internet access);
o Assistance with locating research assistants;
o Assistance with locating Kyrgyz/Russian language teachers;
o Assistance with locating accommodation;
o Assistance with research project:
a) Assistance with organizing trips within the country (planning and logistics);
b) Providing contacts with Aigine’s partners and key informants;
c) Consultations on research issues.
NOTE: Aigine does not provide accommodation.
Requirements:
o Research interests of a candidate should be related to Aigine’s research.
o By the end of the research period there should be given a research report (3-5 pages) including activities, the preliminary results of the research. This report will be posted at the Aigine’s web-site.
o Social research ethics: any activities of the intern fellow cannot be harmful to the reputation of Aigine nor to research subjects.
o In special cases it is possible his/her involvement to activities of Aigine as field research, writing and analysis.
o Administrative overhead:
a) $200 per month for daily work/use in the office;
b) $100 per month for half-day work/use in the office.
Documents for application:
o CV
o Research outline including goal, methods, schedule of activities, and social research ethics (up to 2 pages)
o One recommendation of a professor or supervisor
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INFORMATION ABOUT VISITING RESEARCHERS AND INTERNS
Madeleine Reeves
Research Fellow in Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester, based at the Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change (www.cresc.ac.uk). She holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge (2008), entitled Border Work: An Ethnography of the State at its Limits in the Ferghana Valley. Since November 2009 she has been affiliated with Aigine Cultural Research Center, conducting post-doctoral research on the social, cultural and moral dynamics of labour migration from Batken region of southern Kyrgyzstan to urban Russia. Labour migration has come to be an issue of enormous economic and political significance for Kyrgyzstan. UN estimates list it among the five countries in the world most dependent upon remittances from migrant workers, and many households now rely upon money sent by absent sons and daughters to sustain family budgets. Yet whilst the “macro” dynamics of migration has been well-studied, much less attention has been paid to its social and cultural dynamics: to the meanings of the new transnational relationships that are formed when family members are abroad for large parts of the year; to the administrative and economic arrangements that frequently tend to illegalise migrant labour, and to the consequences of this economic precariousness for livelihoods, imaginaries and relationships between kin. Her research seeks to address these questions by bringing the tools of anthropological research to a study of labour migrants and their families in both “sending” and “receiving” communities. It involves multi-sited fieldwork in Batken (Ak-Tatyr and Ak-Sai village administrations), Bishkek and Moscow during the course of 2010. More about the research can be found on her web-page on the CRESC website (www.cresc.ac.uk/people/Madeleine.html) and links to some past papers she has written on this theme can be found here (http://manchester.academia.edu/MadeleineReeves).
Maria Elisabeth Louw
Anthropologist and currently Assistant Professor at the Department of Anthropology and Ethnography, University of Aarhus. She has done extensive fieldwork in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, focusing in particular on everyday religion and secularism, morality and politics in the context of post-Soviet social change. During her stay at Aigine she was doing research on various kinds of esoteric experiences among Bishkek residents. In 2009 she will embark on a research project which explores how members of the Naqshbandiyya Sufi order in Uzbekistan, Georgia and Tajikistan understand and navigate postsocialism in its various local manifestations – and vice versa: how postsocialist space gives new meaning to Sufism as an esoteric form of experience, worldview and moral understanding.