On 28th November OxTalks will move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events' (full details are available on the Staff Gateway).
There will be an OxTalks freeze beginning on Friday 14th November. This means you will need to publish any of your known events to OxTalks by then as there will be no facility to publish or edit events in that fortnight. During the freeze, all events will be migrated to the new Oxford Events site. It will still be possible to view events on OxTalks during this time.
If you have any questions, please contact halo@digital.ox.ac.uk
In this talk, I argue that unconventional ways of political contention successfully shape the regime, its elites, and its forms of oppression even under the most authoritarian contexts and repressions. Using the context and temporal development of the Kazakh Spring protests (2019-ongoing), I focus on how the interplay between the repressive regime and democratisation struggles define and shape each other. Combining original interview data, digital ethnography and contentious politics studies, I argue that the new generation of activists, the likes of Instagram political influencers and renowned public intellectuals, can de-legitimise and counter one of the most resilient authoritarianisms and inspire the mass protests that none of the formalised opposition ever imagined possible in Kazakhstan. The talk will conceptualise how the post-Nazarbayev Kazakhstan struggles for its path to democratization.
