On November 27, the Alumni Relations Office and the Alumni Council held an Alumni Association Meeting at AUCA. The meeting gathered more than seventy alumni from different departments and class years.

November 19 - 24, 2015 two Practice Pasture Management Training Courses on Sustainable Pasture Management were held by Dr. Zheenbek Kulenbekov during his Environmental and Social Impact Assessment courses at AUCA.

Nuriza Begalieva, a Senior in the European Studies department, spent an exchange semester this spring at Sciences Po, Reims, in France. There she studied the politics of France and the European Union while also improving her French.

On November 26, 2015, AUCA will be celebrating Thanksgiving Day. Members of the AUCA community are invited to pen their own personal “thankyous” (be it to their parents, professors, friends, pets, etc.) and place them on the “Thanksgiving Boards” now up in the main forum.

On 18 November, 2015 four Anthropology students received the Mary Schweitzer Scholarship for Excellence in Cultural Anthropology. The winners are Aidai Kadyralieva, Gulnura Akylbekova, Aisuluu Akhmetova, and Altynai Abdrakhmanova.

 
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Medet Tiulegenov, Head, Division of Politics and International/Area Studies, AUCA
Abstract: The presentation would provide preliminary results of the study of the normative changes in the areas of human rights, gender and ethnicity in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. The cross cutting theme applied in these three issue areas is a norm of participation in public life, which largely defines a notion of a political regime. As a standard of appropriate behavior this norm is looked at through political rhetoric and as well as actions of political actors (mostly the ruling elite).

CASI Research Seminar: “Localizing norms: comparative perspectives on human rights, gender and ethnicity in Central Asia”. Speaker: Medet Tiulegenov, Head, Division of Politics and International/Area Studies, AUCA. Date: November 18, 2015.

On October 29, 2015, 26 students from the Environmental Management and Sustainable Development (EMSD) program conducted field research to count radiation in the AUCA campus area. Vanessa Graf, one of the students on the trip, tells us about her experience.

 
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Philipp Lottholz and Polina Manolova, University of Birmingham, CASI Visiting Scholars
Abstract: This paper aims at inquiring how people in the former Soviet periphery make sense of the transformation that they have undergone since the breakdown of Socialism. Drawing on sociological and social psychological perspectives on post-Socialist societies, we develop the concept of the ‘imaginary West’. The latter has, to our mind, fundamentally shaped the way in which people came to understand post-Socialist reforms, democratisation and integration into the global economy.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry will travel to Austria, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan from October 28 to November 3. In Bishkek, the Secretary will participate in the opening of the new campus of the American University of Central Asia and dedicate the new chancery of the U.S. Embassy.