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Dr. Saulesh Yessenova

Pronouns: she/her

Contact information

Phone number

Office: +1 (403) 220-3480

Location

Office: ES602C

Preferred method of communication

My preferred method of comunication is via email.

Background

Educational Background

Doctor of Philosophy Anthropology, McGill University, 2003

M.A. Sociology, Central European University, 1994

B.A. History & English, Kazakh State University, 1988

Biography

Saulesh Yessenova received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from McGill University in 2003.  She is the author of The Politics and Poetics of the Nation: Urban Narratives of Kazakh Identity (Lambert Academic Publishing, 2009), a monograph based on her PhD thesis.  Upon graduation she was awarded with a Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) post-doctoral fellowship (2003/05), which she took to the University of British Columbia.  From 2005 until 2008, when she got an appointment at UCalgary, she was a post-doctoral fellow at Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Germany. In her previous research, she was particularly interested in a critical conjunction of nation/state-building and crude oil, the key endeavours that Kazakhstan, the country where she conducts her research, launched upon independence.  Key venues in her ethnographic study included public spectacles, corporate disasters, international oil contracts, everyday practices, and the oil-producing communities in the Caspian region, struggling to survive the boom.  In her ongoing research that was supported by SSHRC, she focuses on Kazakhstan’s nuclear history and anthropology.

Research

Areas of Research

Political and environmental anthropology, historical anthropology, post-nuclear politics and societies.

Participation in university strategic initiatives

Courses

Course number Course title Semester
ANTH 371 LEC 01 01 Political Anthropology
ANTH 399 Disaster Studies
ANTH 611 Anthropological Methods of Research

Projects

Atom and Cosmos EXPOsed: Cold War and “Future Energy” in Post-Soviet Kazakhstan.

Awards

  • Fellowship, Calgary Institute for Humanities, 2014
  • Outstanding Author Contribution Award, 2011
  • Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Germany, Postdoctoral Research Fellowship, 2005
  • Social Sciences and Humanities Research Concil Post-doctoral Fellowship, 2003
  • Center for the Study of Nationalism, Central European University, Pre-Doctoral Fellowship, 1995
  • MA with Distinction Central European/Lancaster University, 1994

Publications

  • "“Oil Is Our Wet Nurse”: Oil Production and Munayshilar (Oil Workers) in Soviet Kazakhstan." . Saulesh B Yessenova. Palgrave Macmillan, Springer Nature . 369-398. (2018)