Promising Futures? Education as a Symbolic Resource of Hope in Kyrgyzstan

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Notes

For an excellent critique of ‘intellectual reductionism in the analysis of transition’, see Thompson (2008, pp. 23–24). In my view, this is most accurately characterised as an embracing of neoliberalism, and for further reading on the economic, political and cultural dimensions of this regime I recommend exploring work by Antonio (2007), Bourdieu (2001) and Harvey (2005).

See also Sabloff (1999).

For more on education as a resource of hope in the contemporary global context, see Freyberg-Inan and Cristescu (2007), Giroux (2005), Lauder et al. (2006), Robertson et al. (2007) and Svi Shapiro (2009).

I am thinking here of work by Madeleine Reeves (2004, 2005), Alan deYoung (2002, 2007), and Safarov Niyozov (2006), which engage more directly with the cultural politics of education and the ethnographic study of and with educators in Kyrgyzstan. Norma Jo Baker and Chad Thompson have, individually (Thompson 2008) and together (Baker & Thompson 2009), also made important interventions in critically reconceptualising ‘liberal education’ in Central Asia.

For more on the project of the ‘critical study of cultural practices’ in the work of Pierre Bourdieu and other critical sociologists of culture, see Swartz (1997).

For further discussion, see Amsler (2007, pp. ix–xiv).

According to the Kyrgyzstan Ministry of Education, Science and Youth Policy, the state budgeted 7.6% of its GDP to education in 1990, fluctuated thereafter with an all-time low of 3.5% in 2000, rose to 4.6% in 2005 and 8.7% in 2003 (Shagdar 2006, p. 521). In 2007, the United Nations reported that between 2002 and 2005 an estimated average of 4.4% of the GDP was directed towards education (United Nations Development Programme 2007, p. 267). To put this in some international context, during the same period Iceland (ranked first on the UNDP's ‘human development’ indicators, or HDI) spent an average of 8.1% of GDP, Sierra Leone (ranked last on the HDI) an estimated 4.6%, and Russia (ranked 67th of 177 countries/territories) an estimated 3.6% (United Nations Development Programme 2007, pp. 266–68).

I am grateful to Madeleine Reeves for clarifying this terminology in Kyrgyz.

See also Ahmed (2004).

The ‘global North’ refers to the world's wealthiest and most industrially advanced societies, particularly in North America, Europe and Oceania. In a broader definition it also includes the economically strongest countries in Asia, and replaces both discursively and geographically earlier concepts of ‘first’ or ‘developed’ world. The analytical use of such spatial classifications is increasingly questionable, due to the deterritorialisation and globalisation of capitalism, the emergence of politico-economic alliances such as the G-7, G-8, G-20 and G-33, categories such as ‘BRIC’ (Brazil, Russia, India and China) and ‘emerging economies’. However, for the purposes of this argument and in the context of late-Soviet and early post-Soviet international relations, it remains useful. For more on the concept, see Therien (1999).

See Amsler (2008a) and Ministry of Education (2006, p. 6).

For details about initiatives to align Kyrgyzstani higher education with the Bologna agreement, see http://www.bolognakg.net/, accessed 20 March 2009.

Theatre of the Oppressed Project in Kyrgyzstan and Central Asia main website available at: http://www.toprojectcentralasia.org/page2.php, accessed 23 May 2009.

Thanks to one of the anonymous reviewers for highlighting that the argument might be read in this clearly reductivist manner.

For further reading on semiotic theories of denotation (the literal or intended meaning of a sign) and connotation (a sign's symbolic, affective and ideological meanings), see Barthes (1977), Hall (1980) and Panofsky (1970).

This, of course, does not preclude their simultaneous articulation with other discourses, such as that of post-Soviet ‘democratic transition’ as described by Chad Thompson (2008, pp. 23–25), or of cultural struggle between ‘East’ and ‘West’ (DeYoung 2002).