Zohra Ismail Beben is a doctoral candidate in environmental anthropology at Indiana University Bloomington. Her areas of interest include anthropology of disaster, discourses of risk, place and space, natural resource management and anthropology of development. Her dissertation focused on how discourses of risk are formulated in post-Soviet rural Tajikistan.
Her dissertation, based on seventeen months of field research supported by IREX Individual Advanced Research Opportunities and Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad, investigates the processes of place-making and knowledge production in post-Soviet Tajikistan
About:
I am a PhD student in the Anthropology Department at Indiana University. I have just returned from extensive fieldwork in the Central Asian country of Tajikistan. I worked in two rural mountain and one semi-urban plains community (as a comparison) looking at the politics of resource use as well as perceptions of environmental, social, and economic risks and the interplay among them. I also examine the leadership and structures of authority in the communities including the roles played by government, religious and informal (elders) as well as development actors and other external actors that impact the decision-making process at the local level. I am working on my dissertation now tentatively titled “Living with Uncertainty: Local Perceptions of Risk and Strategies for Coping in Post-Soviet Mountain Communities of Tajikistan”
SfAA Gil Kushner Award.
http://iub.academia.edu/ZohraIsmailBeben
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