Professor Madeleine Reeves
Professor in the Anthropology of Migration
Fellow of St Hugh's College
Unit Affiliations:
Centre on Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS) and Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology (ISCA)
Contact
Email: Madeleine.Reeves@compas.ox.ac.uk
Supervision
I am currently available for supervision.
Biography
Madeleine Reeves came to Social Anthropology with an interdisciplinary background in Social and Political Sciences and the study of Soviet history. After teaching Sociology in Bishkek for two years and studying Kyrgyz, she trained in Social Anthropology, completing her doctorate at the University of Cambridge in 2008. She taught for several years at the University of Manchester, appointed first as RCUK Research Fellow, then Lecturer and Senior Lecturer before becoming Professor of Social Anthropology in 2021. Madeleine has served on the editorial and advisory boards of a number of journals and book series, including on the board of the UCL series, Economic Exposures in Asia, on the boards of the journals Migration and Society and Public Anthropologist. She served as Editor-in-Chief of Central Asian Survey between 2015 and 2019.
Interests
Madeleine's research explores what it means to live together well, by examining the dramatic social, spatial and ecological afterlives of Soviet socialism in contemporary Central Asia.
Over the past two decades, this has led her to examine the everyday workings of new international borders in the Ferghana valley, the impact of new roads and infrastructure investment at Central Asian boarders, the legacies of inter-communal conflict, and the rise of debt-driven labour migration from Kyrgyzstan. Her work on the everyday lives of Kyrgyz migrant workers in Russia was awarded the Rivers Memorial Medal from the Royal the Royal Anthropological Institute in 2018.
More recently, with funding from the Wellcome Trust, Madeleine has led a research team examining emergent markets of assisted reproduction. Focused on the states of Central Asia and the Caucasus, this project explores the intersection of labour migration, economic extraction, and social reproduction across borders.
Much of Madeleine's research has been collaborative, and she has long-standing relationships with Kyrgyzstani universities and research institutes. She is currently developing new research on the politics of land, housing and voice in late Soviet Kyrgyzstan. This is part of a larger project on sovereignty and dispossession in late Soviet Central Asia, which seeks to rethink perestroika-era protest from the Soviet South.
Key publications
Border Work: Spatial Lives of the State in Rural Central Asia
Winner: Past Presidents' Gold Book Award, Association of Borderland Studies (2017)
Winner: Alec Nove Prize for the best book in Russian, Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies, British Association for Slavic and East European Studies (2016)
Winner: Joseph Rothschild Prize, Association for the Study of Nationalities (2015)
The Central Asian World
This landmark book provides a comprehensive anthropological introduction to contemporary Central Asia. Established and emerging scholars of the region critically interrogate the idea of a ‘Central Asian World' at the intersection of post-Soviet, Persianate, East and South Asian worlds.
Edited ByJeanne Féaux de la Croix, Madeleine Reeves
The Everyday Lives of Sovereignty: Political Imagination beyond the State
Around the world, border walls and nationalisms are on the rise as people express the desire to "take back" sovereignty. The contributors to this collection use ethnographic research in disputed and exceptional places to study sovereignty claims from the ground up.
Edited by Rebecca Bryant and Madeleine Reeves
Recent articles
Books and Special Issues
2024. The Central Asian World. Abingdon: Routledge. Jeanne Féaux de la Croix and Madeleine Reeves, eds. [Part of the Routledge ‘Worlds' series of academic handbooks, 50 original chapters]
2021. The Everyday Lives of Sovereignty: Political Imagination Beyond the State. Ithaca: Cornell University Press (with Rebecca Bryant)
2017. Affective States: Entanglements, Suspensions, Suspicions. New York: Berghahn. Initially published as a Special Issue of Social Analysis Vol. 59 (4), 2015 (with Mateusz Laszczkowski)
2014. Border Work: Spatial Lives of the State in Rural Central Asia. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, series on ‘Culture and Society After Socialism'.
2014. Ethnographies of the State in Central Asia: Performing Politics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press (with Judith Beyer and Johan Rasanayagam)
2012. Movement, Power and Place in Central Asia: Contested Trajectories. Abingdon: Routledge. Initially published as a special issue of Central Asian Survey (2011).
Articles and chapters
2023. On the Double Social Life of Failure. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (part of the Special Issue, ‘After Failure', edited by Catherine Alexander) 29, S1: 46-61
2022. Unsettled Space: Unfinished Histories of Border Delimitation in the Ferghana Valley. In Rico Isaacs and Erica Marat, eds., Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Central Asia. Abingdon: Routledge
2022. Falling into the Gaps, Together: On Peer Review as Intellectual Accompaniment. Political and Legal Anthropology Review 45 (1): 119-123.
2022. Vital labors: transacting oocytes across borders in the post-Soviet space. Cultural Anthropology 37 (1): 23-29.
2021. ‘Migratory Life'. In David Montgomery, ed., Central Asia: Context for Understanding. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press
2019. The Queue: Bureaucratic Time, Distributed Legality, and the Work of Waiting in Migrant Moscow. Suomen Antropologi 44 (2): 20-39.
2017. Infrastructural hope: anticipating ‘independent roads' and territorial integrity in southern Kyrgyzstan. Ethnos 82 (4): 711-737.
2016. “And Our Words Must Be Constructive!”: On the Discordances of Glasnost' in the Central Asian Press at a Time of Conflict. Cahiers d'Asie Centrale 26 (1): 77-110.
2016. Diplomat, Landlord, Con-Artist, Thief: Housing Brokers and the Mediation of Risk in Migrant Moscow. The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology 34 (2): 93-109.
2015. Living from the nerves: deportability, indeterminacy and the feel of law in migrant Moscow. Social Analysis 59 (4): 119-136.
2014. Roads of hope and dislocation: infrastructure and the remaking of territory at a Central Asian border. Ab Imperio 15 (3): 235-256.
2013. Clean Fake: Authenticating Documents and Persons in Migrant Moscow. American Ethnologist, 40 (3): 508-524.
2012. Black work, green money: remittances, ritual and domestic economies in southern Kyrgyzstan. Slavic Review, 71 (1): 108-134.
2011. Staying put? Towards a relational politics of mobility at a time of migration. Central Asian Survey, 30 (3-4): 555-576.
2011. Fixing the border: on the affective life of the state in Kyrgyzstan. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 29 (5): 905-923.
