Ksenia Sizonova (UCL) - 2023-24 Students
ksenia.sizonova.23@ucl.ac.uk

Discrimination, resistance, transnationalism – how do Kyrgyz migrant women reflect on their everyday experiences in Russia?

There are increasingly more women in the Central Asian region who participate in international migration mainly to Russia. The labor migrants’ experience in Russia was studied as characterized by racial discrimination and lack of access to legal defense, however, so far, scholarship has focused mostly on male migrants’ experiences. My project asks how the Kyrgyz migrant women reflect on their everyday lives in Russia. My aim is to shed light on how women adapt to, navigate, and covertly resist racial and sexist discrimination in a non-democratic context. The project entails ethnographic fieldwork in Kyrgyzstan. I will conduct in-depth interviews with Kyrgyz migrant women temporarily visiting home, stay-behind family members, and those who returned. I will also engage in digital ethnography and participant observation. This will allow me to account for the role of transnationalism and digital technologies in Kyrgyz migrant women’s experience. By focusing on the stories of this marginalized community, I will advance the understanding of migration, racialization, and gender in the region. Advocating for the rights of racialized women, I will spread knowledge beyond academia by building a cross-platform art project, which will include a digital exhibition and a podcast.

Primary supervisor: Dr Agnieszka Kubal

Secondary supervisor: Dr Victoria Redclift