Current Project | Publications

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Research Interests
Migration, Urban Informality, Social Transformation, Anthropology of the State

Research Area(s)
Kyrgyzstan, Central Asia

Profile

Eliza Isabaeva graduated from the American University-Central Asia in 2005 majoring in Cultural Anthropology. She presented the results of the field research for her BA senior thesis paper at a regional conference at KIMEP, Almaty, Kazakhstan where she was awarded a certificate for the best undergraduate paper.

Eliza finished her MA degree in Social Anthropology from the University of Bern, Switzerland with the Diploma of Honors. A part of the research for her MA thesis paper was published in the Central Asian Survey’s special issue “Movement, Power and Place in Central Asia and Beyond: Contested Trajectories” (2011).

Currently Eliza is a PhD student at the University of Zurich and a Visiting Scholar in the Department "Conflict and Integration" of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle/Saale, Germany. In her new research project, Eliza examines the dynamic interaction between the state and society on the example of internal migrants who reside in an officially illegal neighborhood in the outskirts of Bishkek. She argues that the state neglect to properly address the problems of peripheral neighborhoods has resulted in the emergence of informal institutions and governance which mimic the formal state structures.