“The Village Chooses Us”: Rural Becoming Across Generations and Species in Post-Soviet Kazakhstan

• In Event: Negotiating Belonging and Mobility in Rural Education: Family, Community, and Context

Abstract

This paper explores how rural subjectivities are shaped, negotiated, and reconfigured across generations in a southeastern Kazakhstani village. Drawing on multisite ethnographic fieldwork and diffractive analysis, I examine how families engage with rurality as a dynamic site of ecological learning, intergenerational memory, and more-than-human relationality. Rather than viewing the rural as static or peripheral, I theorize it as a space-time entanglement shaped by Soviet/post-Soviet mobilities, labor, and localized cosmologies. Through stories of movement, return, and generational (dis)connection, I argue that rural learning emerges through affective, embodied, and multispecies engagements. This work contributes to rural education scholarship by foregrounding relational subjectivities and proposing a decolonial, place-based framework that resists binary framings of rural/urban and tradition/modernity.

Author

• Dilraba Anayatova, Arizona State University