Latest Blog Posts

Danagul Yembergenova In 2018, Kazakhstan granted public universities greater institutional autonomy, encouraging them to become more entrepreneurial, internationally competitive, and responsive to societal and economic needs. But autonomy reforms do more than change governance arrangements; they reshape how universities understand themselves. Rather than asking whether universities have become more autonomous, our recent research asks a […]

As a social-anthropologist researching perceptions of remoteness in rural Romania, the object of my research concerns remote villages which have been described as places where people still live like a hundred years ago. They can certainly give that impression as I have also experienced in some of my early encounters. In the following, I want […]

I presented at the Latin American Studies Association congress in Paris in May on a panel titled “Mexico in Global Competition.” LASA is the largest scholarly association in the world for the study of Latin America, with over 13,000 members and an annual congress running to several hundred sessions across disciplines working on the region. […]

Introduction “One can say without exaggeration that Europe invented a ‘convergence machine’, taking in poor countries and helping them become high-income economies.” This was the famous assessment of Indermit Gill, Chief Economist for Europe and Central Asia at the World Bank, in 2012. Now, more than a decade later, this ‘convergence machine’ has delivered meaningful […]

Blog article adapted from University of Oxford MPhil thesis ‘Imagined Inclusion? Language, Identity, and the Limits of Inclusivity in the Pridnestrovian Nation’ and conference paper by the same name, presented at UACES Graduate Forum Research Conference at Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca on 4 June 2026. The thesis assesses how Ukrainian and Romanian are differentially included within […]