Akbota Saudabayeva

Akbota Saudabayeva graduated summa cum laude from Tufts University in 2022, where they studied anthropology and Russian and Eastern European studies. At Tufts, they were the editor-in-chief of the campus news magazine, the head writer of a sketch comedy group, and the instructor of "The Anatomy of a Packed Lunch," a self-designed freshman seminar at the university's experimental college. Upon graduating, they were a recipient of the Pauline and Peter Kozachok Prize from the Russian program. Since 2022, Akbota has worked in a melange of positions that included administering NIH grants for economic research, cheese mongering at a deli, and directing the production of an underground arts and culture newspaper in Boston. At Harvard, Akbota will expand the research on their undergraduate thesis, which sought to complicate and intervene into decolonial discourses in anthropology that long neglected the Soviet Union’s employment of power over Central Asia. By juxtaposing the early Soviet modernization project’s simultaneous maintenance and destruction of Central Asian indigeneity — through nationalities policy, labor programs, and famine — with Western capitalist development models, their research seeks to unravel the Soviet Union’s ambiguous effect and status as a colonial power with a distinct ideological foundation.