Dr. Saulesh Yessenova
Positions
Associate Professor
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
Dr. 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 (2009), a monograph based on her doctoral dissertation.
Following her graduation, Dr. Yessenova was awarded a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) postdoctoral fellowship (2003–2005), which she held at the University of British Columbia. She subsequently continued her postdoctoral work at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Germany (2005–2008) before joining the University of Calgary as a faculty member.
Dr. Yessenova’s research explores the intersections of nation/state-building and natural resource development, particularly crude oil, in Kazakhstan—a country where she conducts extensive ethnographic fieldwork. Her work critically examines how Kazakhstan’s independence era projects, such as nation-building and oil extraction, shape and are shaped by local and global dynamics. Her research has engaged diverse ethnographic contexts, including public spectacles, corporate crises, international oil contracts, everyday practices, and the resilience of oil-producing communities in the Caspian region amid the boom-and-bust cycles of the petroleum industry.
Since 2016, Dr. Saulesh Yessenova has shifted her focus to Cold War history and the anthropology of Kazakhstan during its time as a republic of the USSR. Her current research examines Soviet military installations, including the Semipalatinsk nuclear weapons test site and the Baikonur Cosmodrome, the latter of which remains active today as a major spaceport.
Her latest essay, “The Russian Ecology of Leaving Earth,” published in Representations, critically engages with the interplay of technology and utopianism generated by the space age. In this work, she explores the tension between dwelling at and departing from Baikonur, revealing how this dynamic underpinned the Soviet colonial project of conquering both the cosmos and the terrestrial environment. By highlighting this historically constructed tension, her research interrogates the utopian vision of space travel and the ontology of the present as one of deflation and uncertainty. She frames the space age as a dialectic that questions the space age as a state of soon-to-be-leaving Earth.
At present, she is working on her book manuscript on necropolitical indifference of the atomic age.
Research
Areas of Research
Participation in university strategic initiatives
Courses
| Course number | Course title | Semester |
|---|---|---|
| ANTH 371 LEC 01 01 | Political Anthropology | |
| ANTH 466 | Disaster Studies | |
| ANTH 611 | Anthropological Methods of Research | |
| ANTH 573 | Advanced Seminar in Social and Cultural Anthropology | |
| DEST 593 | Honors Seminar in Development Studies |
Projects
The Semipalatinsk Nuclear Test Site was the main Soviet proving ground where 116 atmospheric and 340 underground explosions of atomic and thermonuclear bombs were conducted, producing radioactive fallout comparable to that in the Pacific region. In Qazaq society, this violent 40-year history has been framed as a genocide committed by the USSR. I approach this claim as a manifestation of apocalyptic thinking and a form of communication with the future within radiological time.
This anthropogenic time converges multiple temporalities. It carries uncanny projections of nuclear decay’s cumulative effects into the future. When will these threats and anxieties end? This ethnographic inquiry addresses this societal question, evoking sentiments about destiny, hope, and sovereignty in a contaminated environment. It leads to a historical analysis, retracing the experiences of communities that lived in the shadow of the bomb and conscripts recruited to do the dirty work. Alongside these accounts, I examine the perspectives of bureaucrats and scientists tasked to defend the Soviet political self.
This exercise helps establish the symbiotic relationship between the MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction) doctrine, which drove the international nuclear exchange, and the biopolitical regime in Kazakhstan that ensured smooth operations of nuclear weapons testing. My key argument is that MAD was inseparable from the technopolitics of the Cold War. As a power technology rooted in imperial visions and practices, it scaffolded a spatialized apocalypse by deterrence. This shaped the necropolitics of the nuclear age and a society’s ongoing quest for closure in the face of harm and historical injustice.
Awards
- Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), Insight Development Grant, 2016
- Fellowship, Calgary Institute for Humanities, 2014
- Outstanding Author Contribution Award, 2011
- Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), Standard Research Grant, 2010
- Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Germany, Postdoctoral Research Fellowship, 2005
- Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Post-doctoral Fellowship, 2003
Publications
- “The Russian Ecology of Leaving Earth”. Saulesh Yessenova. Representations. University of California Press.. 167: 1-32. (2024)
- “Tengiz Oil Enclave: Labor, Business, and the State”. Saulesh Yessenova. Political and Legal Anthropology Review (PoLAR). American Anthropological Association . 35/1: 94 – 113. (2012)
- “Nomad for Export, Not for Domestic Consumption: Kazakhstan’s Arrested Endeavour to ‘Put the Country on the Map’”. Saulesh Yessenova. Studies in Russian & Soviet Cinema, UK. 5/2: 181 – 203. (2011)
- “‘Borrowed Places:’ Eviction Wars and Property Rights Formalization in Kazakhstan”. Saulesh Yessenova. Research in Economic Anthropology, USA. 30: 11 – 45. (2010)
- “Hawkers and Containers in Zarya Vostoka: How ‘Bizarre’ is the Post-Soviet Bazaar?”. Research in Economic Anthropology, USA. 24: 37-59. (2006)
- “‘Routes and Roots’ of Kazakh Identity: Urban Migration in Post-socialist Kazakhstan”. Saulesh Yessenova. The Russian Review, USA. October 64/4: 2 – 20. (2005)
- The Politics and Poetics of the Nation: Urban Narratives of Kazakh Identity. Saulesh Yessenova. Lambert Academic Publishing.. ISBN: 978-3-8383-0333-8. (2009)
- “‘Oil Is Our Wet Nurse”: Oil Production and Munayshilar (Oil Workers) in Soviet Kazakhstan." . Touraj Atabaki, Elisabetta Bini, Kaveh Ehsani (eds.). Working for Oil: Comparative Social Histories of Labour Petroleum. Palgrave Macmillan . 369-398. (2018)
- After Oil. open-access book co-authored by 30 academics. Petrocultures Research Group: Edmonton. 77 pages. (2016)
- “Political Economy of Oil Privatization in Post-Soviet Kazakhstan”. Michael Watts, A. Mason, and H. Appel (eds.). Subterranean Estates: Life Worlds of Oil and Gas. Cornell University Press. 291-306. (2015)
- “Cinema as Branding”. Kantarci, Kemal, Muzaffer Uysal, and Vincent P. Magnini, (eds.). Tourism in Central Asia: Cultural Potential and Challenges. Taylor & Francis Group, CRC Press. 173-200. (2014)
- “Tengiz Crude: A View from Below”. Richard Pomfret, Gaël Raballand, and Boris Najman (eds.). The Economics and Politics of Oil in the Caspian Basin: The Redistribution of Oil Revenues in Azerbaijan and Central Asia. Routledge, UK.. 176-198. (2008)
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