The Center for Regional Studies

Dates: June 6-9, 2024

Format: in-person

Working language: English

Venue: 16-A Satpaev St, Almaty

Turan University hosts the Annual Conference of the Central Eurasian Studies Society (CESS). This event will be the first Annual Conference of the organization to be held in the region of Central Eurasia, rather than North America. Turan University holds the Conference of this global professional organization in its premises acting as one of the leading higher education institutions of Kazakhstan.

The CESS has been holding its conferences since 2000 at the universities of North America and since recent times in the format of regional conferences at the universities of Central Eurasia.
These conferences became a platform for communication and exchange of opinions for scholars and experts of Central Eurasia from all over the world.

Central Eurasian Studies Society is a non-governmental organization uniting scholars and experts of history, culture and modern development of Central Eurasia – a region, that embraces alongside with the Central Asian state (Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan), also Iran, Afghanistan, Mongolia, the Caucasus, Southern Siberia, the Volga region, Eastern and Central Europe, and other adjacent areas. The Society aims at promoting interrelations and cooperation between scholars of Central Eurasia, enhancing the level of academic knowledge and developing education in the region, promoting and spreading general knowledge and public interest of the region in the world.

Turan University invites all scholars and experts to contribute to the development of social science disciplines studying Central Eurasia. In the frame of the Conference of the Central Eurasian Studies Society more than 130 panels on history, culture and current development of the countries and peoples of Central Eurasia, as well as round tables on urgent academic issues, discussion of new books on the region, will be held. Turan University will offer a cultural program to the participants, which will give insight into the culture of Kazakhstan and other Central Asian countries.

More than 450 scholars from different countries of the world (USA, Canada, Central Asian and European countries, China, India etc.) will deliver their papers at the Conference. The keynote talks at the CESS Conference will be given by Sara Cameron, a well-known expert in the history of Soviet Kazakhstan, Professor of the University of Maryland, the US, and Gulnara O. Abikeyeva, leading expert on Kazakhstan’s cinematography, Doctor of Art, Professor of Turan University.

KEYNOTE SPEAKER 1

PROFESSOR SARAH CAMERON (UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND, USA)

Date: June 7, 2024

Time: 16:45-17:45

Place: Assembly Hall

Sarah Cameron is Associate Professor of History at the University of Maryland, College Park (USA). Her research interests include genocide and crimes against humanity, environmental history, and the societies and cultures of Central Asia. At present, she is at work on a book, Aral: Life and Death of a Sea, about the causes and consequences of the disappearance of Central Asia’s Aral Sea. Additionally, she is the author of The Hungry Steppe: Famine, Violence, and the Making of Soviet Kazakhstan (Cornell University Press, 2018), which examines one of the most heinous crimes of the Stalinist regime, the Kazakh famine of the 1930s. The book won numerous awards in the United States. It has been translated into Kazakh, Russian and Ukrainian (forthcoming). Her research has been supported by the Carnegie Corporation, the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars, the Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton and others. She received her PhD from Yale University.

KEYNOTE SPEAKER 2

PROFESSOR GULNARA O. ABIKEEVA (TURAN UNIVERSITY, KAZAKHSTAN)

Date: June 8, 2024

Time: 16:45-17:45

Place: Assembly Hall

“Why is the Central Asian cinema rethinking the establishment of Soviet rule thirty years after the countries gained independence?”

The first wave of this process took place in Central Asian cinema in the 1990s, followed by a twenty-year pause. This topic has been raised again in the last two or three years on several fronts. The Uzbek film “Two Thousand Songs of Farida” and the Kazakh film “Talak” reinterpret the Soviet ideologeme of “Oriental Woman Emancipation”. The theme of the Asharshylyk (the 1930-1933 famine in Kazakhstan) is explored in “Qash” and “The Land that Stopped the Wind.” “Kanysh” reflects on industrialization. What influenced this new revision of history and the activity of filmmakers?

Gulnara Abikeyeva is Professor of Cultural Studies at Turan University in Almaty. She is the author of twelve books on Central Asian cinema. Her book Nation-Building in Kazakhstan and other Central Asian States, and How This Process is Reflected in Cinematography’ (2006) was awarded the National prize “Kulager”. He other works include Cinema in Central Asia. Rewriting Cultural Histories (2013) co-edited by Michael Rouland, Birgit Beumers and The Unknown New Wave of Central Asian Cinema (2013) co-edited by Kim Ji-Seok.