In this episode, Paolo speaks to Dr. Jasmin Dall’Agnola, external lecturer in smart city and surveillance studies at the Department of Political Science at the University of Zurich, about her work researching smart cities in Central Asia as well as her reflections on doing fieldwork under surveillance.

Jasmin has done extensive fieldwork across Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan during her doctoral and post-doctoral fellowships. Her work has focused on technology adoption, Chinese surveillance cameras, and authoritarian practices in Central Asia. In several other publications, she has also written about regional-specific research methodologies and fieldwork ethics.

Some of her open-access publications we touch upon during our conversation are: Researching authoritarian smart cities from below (2025), From Old to New Colonial Dependencies: Public Perceptions of Chinese Surveillance Cameras in Central Asia (2025), Fieldwork Under Surveillance: A Research Note (2023), From Romantic Advances to Cyberstalking in the Field (2023). 

Dapter is hosted by Vlast.kz, produced by Oliver Fisk, and features music and design by Daniyar Mussirov. Tune in next month for a new episode, spread the word to your colleagues, and send us some love and support at patreon.com/vlastkz. 

In this episode, Paolo speaks to Dr. Hélène Thibault, associate professor of political science at Nazarbayev University in Kazakhstan, whose work explores religion, secularism, and the Soviet legacy.

Hélène has lived and worked in Kazakhstan for a decade and her research has focused, also through ethnography, on gender dynamics in Central Asia, more specifically, marriage, sex work, and domestic violence.

At the crossroads between sociology, anthropology, and political studies, Hélène’s work on gender dynamics is best introduced with the short piece The Many Faces of Polygyny in Kazakhstan, which is today’s main topic. In this episode, we will also focus on her more recent research and publications focusing on Kazakhstan and the wider Central Asian region.
Dapter is hosted by Vlast.kz, produced by Oliver Fisk, and features music and design by Daniyar Mussirov. Tune in next month for a new episode, spread the word to your colleagues, and send us some love and support at patreon.com/vlastkz

In this episode, Paolo speaks to Asel Doolotkeldieva, a research fellow at the University of Potsdam in Germany, whose work explores the intersection of political conflict and extractivism in Kyrgyzstan, and more recently, across Central Asia.

Asel has a couple of decades of experience researching the political ecology of large-scale extraction and how it affects domestic societies and local communities.

Asel expanded her focus to encompass the geopolitical encroachment of foreign powers in Central Asia's mining projects and whether the role of Russia, China, or the EU led to "variegated sovereignty" perceptions among the local population.

At the crux of domestic and global politics, corporate power, and global capital, some of Asel's work can be accessed online in open access. This episodes focuses mostly on the article Mining for Norms: International Extractivism, Chinese Business, and the Indeterminacy of Compliance in Kyrgyzstan, but also touches on her more recent research endeavors in Kazakhstan.

Dapter is hosted by Vlast.kz, produced by Oliver Fisk, and features music and design by Daniyar Mussirov. Tune in next month for a new episode, spread the word to your colleagues, and send us some love and support at patreon.com/vlastkz

In this episode, Paolo speaks to Togzhan Kassenova, author of Atomic Steppe: How Kazakhstan Gave Up the Bomb, taking listeners into two of the most consequential chapters of Kazakhstan’s modern history, the country’s experience under the Soviet nuclear testing program, and its decision to give up nuclear weapons after independence.

As Togzhan explains, her extensive fieldwork made the book possible — it was both conducting archival research in the US and Russia and speaking to policymakers, diplomats, and nuclear test survivors in Kazakhstan that allowed that allowed her to properly tell the country’s nuclear story

Atomic Steppe has gone on to become part of a renewed cultural discourse regarding Kazakhstan’s Soviet past and its current post-independence identity. This episode examines both the making of the book and the research journey behind it.

Dapter is hosted by Vlast.kz, produced by Oliver Fisk, and features music and design by Daniyar Mussirov. Tune in next month for a new episode, spread the word to your colleagues, and send us some love and support at patreon.com/vlastkz