Empowering and Strengthening the Central Asian Academic Community (ESCAAC Project)

Only one research article on Central Asia written by a non-local scholar was published in the British Journal of Political Science in the past five years. This illustrates the epistemic injustice facing indigenous scholarship as well as the urgent need to build networks and partnerships with global outlets. This writing workshop programme aims to train and empower early career researchers from the Central Asian region by; 1) increasing their contributions to academic knowledge in mainstream disciplinary journals, and; 2) fostering production of new and/or indigenous analytical frames. Our informal pilot projects conducted in 2021 and 2022 exhibited two major problems impeding the publications for local scholars: the lack of tools to engage in research, and the absence of an academic writing culture. This programme will address both problems by creating a community of writers and offering a series of skill-development seminars applied under the personal supervision by senior scholars.

Workshop team: Dr Gulzat Botoeva, Swansea University; Dr Zulfiya Imyarova, Narxoz University; Dr Assel Tutumlu, Near East University; Dr Botakoz Kassymbekova, University of Basel; Professor Rico Isaacs, University of Lincoln; Ms Sofya du Boulay, Oxford Brookes University; Ms Hikoyat Salimova, Hafencity University Hamburg.