Madeleine Reeves is Professor in the Anthropology of Migration at the Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology and the Centre on Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS), and a Fellow by Resolution of St. Hugh’s College. Between 2007 and 2021 she taught at the University of Manchester.
She has wide-ranging interests in borders, labour migration, sovereignty, time, and social reproduction. Her first monograph, Border Work: Spatial Lives of the State in Rural Central Asia (Cornell 2014), challenged conventional approaches to political transformation in Central Asia by revealing how the state is produced in the interstices of daily life in a region of disputed borderland between Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. She has since sought to bring a critical anthropological voice to interdisciplinary debates about the intersections between infrastructure, immobility and intercommunal conflict and co-existence. For this work she has drawn on periodic return fieldwork to the border villages of the Ferghana valley where she has examined the progressive militarisation and socio-spatial transformation of a region of disputed territory through the construction of politically contentious ‘bypass roads’ and border settlements for ethnic Kyrgyz ‘returnees’ from Tajikistan. Since 2009 she has conducted research on transnational labour migration from Central Asia to Russia and with the Kyrgyz diaspora in Russia, joining scholars who have sought to bring considerations of value, ethics and intergenerational care to our analysis of mobile and transnational life.
She is currently working on two projects:
- With Dr. Jeanne Féaux de la Croix she is completing a major handbook of Central Asian anthropology for the Routledge Worlds series
- With funding from a Wellcome Trust Investigator Award in the Social Sciences, she is developing new research on the linkages between labour migration and the economization of reproductive capacity in the post-Soviet space.
She serves on the editorial/advisory boards of journals and book series including Migration and Society, Public Anthropologist, Etnograficheskoe obozrenie, International Quarterly for Asian Studies, Central Asian Survey, Economic Exposures in Asia (UCL Press) and Spaces of Peace, Security and Development (Bristol University Press).
Email: Madeleine.Reeves@compas.ox.ac.uk
Twitter : @magdagul
