Why Kyrgyzstan?

The short answer is: Why not?

But that doesn't really get to the truth of it.

I've always had a fascination with Central Asia. I think part of it is simply the appeal of going to a part of the world that most people couldn't locate on a map. That's how it started. But as I've learned more about the world, I've recognized just what an amazing place Central Asia is. For hundreds of years, the region has been caught in a tug of war between various empires. Only in the past few decades has it been able to develop its identity -- which has been there all along -- on the world's stage. And it's still a region that's finding itself. It's strategically located between Russia, China, India and the Middle East. It is posed to play a central role in global politics in the coming decades. And I'm interested to see firsthand how that plays out.

But why Kyrgyzstan? And why now?

It basically came down to the fact that I knew I needed to do something for a year after graduating from college. If I had applied to grad schools last fall, they would have seen two and a half crappy years of college part one, an eight year hiatus and one decent year from college part two. I didn't think that I would make a compelling enough case at that point to get into the grad schools that I want to. So I wanted to wait until this fall to apply to enter in the fall of 2011. This left me with a year to fill after graduation. Sure, I could have just hung around Chapel Hill and waited tables. But that wouldn't make me any more compelling a candidate for graduate school either. So I started looking for yearlong research programs. And I stumbled upon Fulbright.

Fulbright allows you to apply for a yearlong (roughly -- Kyrgyzstan is ten months) independent research fellowship in which you can explore just about anything that you can imagine. The trick is to prove to Fulbright how your research will help your future academic and/or career aspirations. The other trick is to look at the global competition statistics and apply to a country that doesn't get a ton of applicants. See, you're only competing against the other applicants who've applied to your specific country. So while the UK gets 600 applicants for 14 spots, Kyrgyzstan last year got three applicants. For two grants.

Fortunately my research interests lie in Central Asia anyway, so the lack of competition was just a bonus. My current plan for once I'm done in Kyrgyzstan is to enter graduate school in linguistics, focusing on the sociolinguistics and structural interaction of Slavic and Turkic languages in the former Soviet Central Asia.

And that's how I came up with my grant proposal: Post-Soviet language policy and its effects on the Kyrgyz education system.

In short, I'll be examining what Kyrgyzstan has done with Kyrgyz and Russian since the fall of the Soviet Union. What they're trying to do is bridge what has become a large rural/urban divide between the two languages, with city-dwellers primarily speaking Russian and country-dwellers primarily Kyrgyz. I will be examining how the country can better utilize its primary education system to build the bilingual society that it claims to want. Of course, the situation is significantly more complicated than that, but that's the simplest explanation.

So that's what I'll be researching while I'm there. I'll also be focusing on developing my Russian skills and picking up a bit of Kyrgyz along the way. And hopefully I'll be making contacts for future graduate school research. It's going to be quite the adventure I'm sure, and I look forward to chronicling it here.