Madeleine Reeves
I am a Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester, where I am also affiliated with the ESRC Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change. I studied at the University of Chicago, where I receiving an MA in Russian/Soviet history, and at the University of Cambridge, where I studied for an undergraduate degree in Social and Political Sciences and from where I received my PhD in Social Anthropology in 2008. Between 2000 and 2002, and again in 2005 I taught at the American University - Central Asia (AUCA) in Bishkek. I am currently on the Advisory Board for AUCA's newly-established Central Asian Studies Institute and am Associate Editor of the journal, Central Asian Survey. Between 2007 and 2012 I was an RCUK Research Fellow in Conflict, Cohesion and Change at the ESRC Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change (CRESC).
My research lies in the anthropology of politics, with a particular interest in borders, transnational migration, documentary practices and the ethnography of the state. I have explored this in two main projects: a doctoral project, subsequently revised in a book (Cornell 2014) on the everyday workings of new international borders in the Ferghana valley, and a post-doctoral project on citizenship, paperwork, money and the negotiation of 'legal' migration among Kyrgyzstani migrant workers between Batken and Moscow.
In Manchester I teach undergraduate and graduate courses in Social Anthropology and have been actively involved in developing links with schools and colleges that teach Anthropology A-level.
Phone: +44 161 275 3488
Address: Social Anthropology
Arthur Lewis Building 2.054
University of Manchester
Oxford Road
Manchester M13 9PL
My research lies in the anthropology of politics, with a particular interest in borders, transnational migration, documentary practices and the ethnography of the state. I have explored this in two main projects: a doctoral project, subsequently revised in a book (Cornell 2014) on the everyday workings of new international borders in the Ferghana valley, and a post-doctoral project on citizenship, paperwork, money and the negotiation of 'legal' migration among Kyrgyzstani migrant workers between Batken and Moscow.
In Manchester I teach undergraduate and graduate courses in Social Anthropology and have been actively involved in developing links with schools and colleges that teach Anthropology A-level.
Phone: +44 161 275 3488
Address: Social Anthropology
Arthur Lewis Building 2.054
University of Manchester
Oxford Road
Manchester M13 9PL
less
Related Authors
InterestsView All (23)
Uploads
Papers by Madeleine Reeves
Berghahn Books, 2017.
http://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/LaszczkowskiAffective
Berghahn Books, 2017.
http://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/LaszczkowskiAffective
Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, Madeleine Reeves follows traders, farmers, water engineers, conflict analysts, and border guards as they negotiate the practical responsibilities and social consequences of producing, policing, and deriving a livelihood across new international borders that are often encountered locally as “chessboards” rather than lines. She shows how the negotiation of state spatiality is bound up with concerns about legitimate rule and legitimate movement, and explores how new attempts to secure the border, materially and militarily, serve to generate new sources of lived insecurity in a context of enduring social and economic inter-dependence. A significant contribution to Central Asian studies, border studies, and the contemporary anthropology of the state, Border Work moves beyond traditional ethnographies of the borderland community to foreground the effortful and intensely political work of producing state space.
Case studies draw on archival research and oral history to explore the workings—and unintended consequences—of policies aimed at sedentarizing, collectivizing and resettling populations as a means to fix and territorialize space. The book also examines ethnographic studies attuned to the role of movement in sustaining social life, from Soviet-era trade networks that linked rural Central Asia and the Russian metropolis, to pilgrimage routes through which ‘kazakhness’ is articulated, to the contemporary moralization of migration abroad in search of work.
Rather than analysing ‘flows’ as abstract processes, the book enquires about effortful activity, material infrastructures, political relations and social habits through which people, ideas, knowledge, skills and material objects move or are prevented from moving. As such, it offers new insights into the complex intersections of movement, power and place in this important region over the last two centuries.
This book was originally published as a special issue of Central Asian Survey.