Aleksandar Kostić

Role
Anthropology Graduate Student
Bio/Description

Aleksandar Kostić studies environmentalist activism and the state in Kyrgyzstan. He is looking at a network of environmentalist organizations operating in the western part of Kyrgyzstan. On the one hand, Aleksandar hopes to learn more about how these activists became interested in trying to end certain practices that some of them used to engage in themselves, and about the role of their interactions with the environment (especially deer) and the concepts of Kyrgyzness in this transformation. On the other hand, he hopes to see how the ideas about and the effects of the Kyrgyz state are produced in the triangle between the local environmentalists, international NGOs, and the state officials. Aleksandar’s other research interests include migrations, time, infrastructure, education, kinship, postsocialist postcolonialism, and the postsocialist Europe and Eurasia more generally, especially the Balkans. He holds an undergraduate degree in sociology from University of Belgrade, Serbia, and an MA in anthropology from University of Sussex, UK. As part of the latter, he conducted ethnographic fieldwork with Serbian migrants in Switzerland, focusing on the infrastructural aspects of building and maintaining transnational social networks.