Research Interest
Linguistic anthropology; language in culture and interaction; pragmatics and discourse; expressive culture, oral traditions, and performance; language ideologies; methods and ethics in social science research; (post) Soviet nationalisms in Central Asia; the geographies and ecologies of Eurasia
Eva-Marie Dubuisson received her PhD in Linguistic Anthropology from the University of Michigan. Support for her doctoral research on the oral tradition of aitys poetry in Kazakhstan came from Fulbright, Wenner Gren, the Eurasia Program of the Social Science Research Council, and the Institute for the Humanities at UM. Prior to joining Nazarbayev University, she held a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, and taught as Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Bogazici University, Istanbul. Dubuisson’s teaching and research interests include expressive culture and performance; semantic and pragmatic meaning; linguistic anthropology and discourse analysis; methods and ethics in social science research, and the politics, history, ethnography, ecology and geographies of Eurasia. Her writing and research often center on themes of socio-political accountability and worldview, as well as oral tradition and ancestral dialogues in Kazakh culture, and how these emerge in different forms of story and encounter. What kind of social alignments and possibilities are made possible in interaction? Her recent research has been supported by a Marie Curie CIG Fellowship from the European Commission, a BAGEP fellowship from the Science Academy, Turkey, a short term research fellowship from the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research in the U.S., and by multiple grants from Nazarbayev University.
Monograph
2017 Living Language in Kazakhstan: The Dialogic Emergence of an Ancestral Worldview. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press (Central Eurasia in Context Series).
Edited Volume
2020 Co-edited with Ananda Breed and Ali Iğmen. Creating Culture in (Post)Socialist Central Asia. London: Palgrave MacMillan.
Journal Articles (peer reviewed)
2022 Co-authored with Jeanne Féaux de la Croix, Beatrice Penati, and Jeanine Dagyeli, et. al. “Roundtable Studying the Anthropocene in Central Asia: the challenge of sources and scales in human – environment relations” in Central Asian Survey 41 (1).
2021 “Mapping Participant Frameworks in the Aitys of Birzhan and Sara” in Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 31(3): 357 – 381. Special Issue in Honor of Judith T. Irvine.
2020 “Whose World? Discourses of Protection for Land, Resources, and the Environment in Kazakhstan” in Problems of Post Communism 69 (4-5): 410-422. Special Issue on Sustainable Development, Regional Governance, and International Organizations.
Book chapters (peer reviewed)
(fc) “The Aitys of Birzhan and Sara: A Young Woman’s Voice in Kazakh Oral
Literature” in Gabriel McGuire, ed. Tulips in Bloom: An Anthology of Modern Central Asian Literature. Palgrave MacMillan (The Steppe and Beyond Series).
2022 “Ancestors, Aitys, and the Little Sister” in David Montgomery, ed. Central Asia: Contexts for Understanding. University of Pittsburgh Press (Central Eurasia in Context series).
2020 “Poets of the People: Learning to Make Culture in Kazakhstan” and “Conclusion: Interweaving Texts” in Breed, Dubuisson, and Igmen, eds. Creating Culture in Post-Socialist Central Asia. Palgrave Macmillan.
Book reviews
2022 Improvising the Voice of the Ancestors: Heritage and Identity in Central Asia, 2021, by Mustafa Coşkun. Requested by Nomadic Peoples 26 (2): 291-297.
Courses offered
Introduction to Sociolinguistics
Language and Communication
Discourse Analysis
Language Ideologies
Capstone Seminar
Disciplinary Methodologies
Qualitative Methodologies in Social Science Research
Graduate Research Supervision