Dapter: The Toil of Tajikistan’s Migrant Workers, with Malika Bahovadinova

This is the fifth episode of our new podcast.Find here the first, second, third, and fourth episodes.In this episode, Paolo is speaking to Dr.Malika Bahovadinova, lecturer in International Studies at Leiden University.Malika is an anthropologist who conducted extensive fieldwork in Tajikistan during her doctoral and post-doctoral fellowships focusing on global migration management practices.For her ethnographic research, she did participant observation, embedding herself for extended periods of time with the International Organisation for Migration.She is the author of a new book published this year by the University of Pennsylvania Press, titled Making Migrants: International Migration Management in Tajikistan.Malika has also authored a number of academic articles, and in this episode we will discuss one in particular, Subaltern citizenship: naturalization and belonging for New Russian citizens from Central Asia, published in 2024.In our conversation, we try to unpick one of the main focuses of both the article and the book: the politics of representation involving migrants from Central Asia, that is, how the social group of migrant workers gets classified, and then how that classification is produced and reproduced over time.As we’ll hear, these questions of representation are often entangled in geopolitical and postcolonial power relations.Listen to this episode on Spotify, Amazon Music, or Apple Podcasts.Sign up to our newsletter here.