Laura Yerekesheva – Al Farabi Kazakh National University

Dear friends, welcome! This website was designed for several purposes. As its personal name suggests, its aim is to provide a general information related to my professional work and activities, structured around research, publications and talks, teaching, public outreach activities. All this you could find in the respective sections of the website.

However, equally important for me is to eventually make this online space a special resource place to promote discussions and thoughts, reasoning and questioning, to contribute to open and free flows of knowledge. It will be my privilege to make this space useful for various people – students, teachers, researchers, professionals, practitioners, all interested in the themes around which my research and activity take place.

The themes are identities, social cohesion, the “Other”, cross-cultural and religious encounters and dialogue. These themes are eternal ones. Since the dawn of the history, they dominated the social and cultural landscapes globally, whereas time and space only added special flavours to them. What are in them? What makes them so vividly present and eternally rooted in our lives and histories?

Their significance lies perhaps in the fact that individuals and social groups (irrespectively of how one calls them - “homo sapiens”, “social animals” or “eternal souls”) live in social and cultural spaces, where communication and dialogue are their intrinsic and permanent categories.

I invite you, dear friends, to explore these themes and ideas behind them, and will be happy to hear from you. For your feedback please kindly use the contact form here or you may also write to me at info@laurayerekesheva.com

Profile

General Information
I teach and research at al-Farabi Kazakh National University’s (KazNU) Oriental Faculty; Faculty of History (Almaty, Kazakhstan) and “left my digital marks” on key research platforms with the following research IDs:

Academia.edu
ORCID ID
SCOPUS Author ID: 57192744578
Web of Science Researcher ID AAY-6329-2021
Google Scholar
ResearchGate
Russian Scientific Citations Index (РИНЦ): 4128-5010
laura.yerekesheva@kaznu.edu.kz

Fields of Interest

Areas of my research interest include Identity, the “Other”, Cross-Cultural and Religious Encounters, Social Cohesion, Systems, which I explore from a cross-disciplinary perspective, within the fields of theoretical sociology, sociology and anthropology of religion, history, art. Geographically these themes embrace Central and South Asia.

Seemingly scattered, unrelated and different, these themes are surprisingly interwoven with each other, and, if seen from a systemic perspective, represent various elements of the broader mosaic picture, or threads of a multi-coloured canvas of cultures and societies.

Research on these and other themes are scattered across 80 plus research works published in Kazakhstan and internationally in Russian and English languages, including articles in peer-reviewed international journals, authorship of 2 individual monographs, 4 UNESCO policy research publications; editorship of 1 collective monograph, co-editorship of several international conference proceedings published in Kazakhstan and India.

For Annotated Bibliography of Books written by me, please click here

Professional Outreach Activity

Deputy Chairperson, Expert, Committee on Providing Quality in Education and Science, Ministry of Education and Science of the Republic of Kazakhstan (2021-currently)
Deputy Chairperson, Dissertation Council, Faculty of History, al Farabi Kazakh National University (2018-2021, 2021-currently);
Expert Participation in the Meeting on Strategic Planning, UNDP Sustainable Development Partnership with the Republic of Kazakhstan for 2021-2025 (2019)
Member, National Scientific Council of the Republic of Kazakhstan, Section “Mangilik El” (Human and Social Sciences) (2018-2019)
Expert, Control Committee in the Field of Highest Education and Science, Ministry of Education and Science of the Republic of Kazakhstan (2013-2016)

Membership in Organizations, Editorial Boards, Associations

Member, Editorial Team, Section of History (History, Ethnography, Anthropology), International Peer-Reviewed Journal “The New Researches of Tuva” (since 2018) https://nit.tuva.asia/nit/about/editorialTeam
Member, Executive Committee of UNITWIN/UNESCO Network for Interreligious Dialogue and Intercultural Understanding (Paris, 2015)
Member, Advisory Committee for UNESCO Programme "Developing E-Learning Resources for Promoting Intercultural Dialogue and Mutual Understanding" (Paris, 2016)
Contributing Editor, Global Dialogue Review Bimonthly Journal by Global Dialogue Forum (New Delhi, since 2013)
Member, Central Eurasian Studies Society (CESS)
Member, European Society for Central Asian Studies (ESCAS)
Member, an external Advisory Board of relevant European and Central Asian experts in support of EU’s SEnECA Project. https://www.seneca-eu.net/advisory-board/

Awards

“Distinguished Alumni Award-2016” by Indian Council for Cultural Relations, Ministry of External Affairs of India (2017)
Medal for the achievement in science by Ministry of Education and Science of the Republic of Kazakhstan (2017)
Special diploma for one of the best articles-2008, awarded by the editorial board of the peer-reviewed journal SOCIS (Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniia) (2009)

Selected work