Borderlands of the post-Soviet South: crossing spaces with Aisuluu, a student from Kyrgyzstan

                In this article we get to know a young girl from Kyrgyzstan and a fragment of her story. Aisuluu leaves to study in a neighbouring country, where our student paths intertwine in a big city and on a small campus. My task as a researcher is to leave visible the agency of the person herself as she walks her own paths through life and crosses boundaries within and outside her native social worlds – sometimes relying on the experiences of close people and sometimes departing from them to change the trajectory. Aisuluu has not only had the opportunity to move between the liminalities of bordering cities, close cultures, and intra-regional divisions. She is also learning to navigate the chronotopes of one of the transitory phases of her life: at the moment of our meeting, shortly before the pandemic, an 18-year-old girl is mapping out the route of her adulthood and autonomy.

                This is an immersive text that shows the relativity of scales and the importance of micro-levels for understanding deep human and social processes. It is also an invitation to continue searching for meaningful contacts with other regions of the global South and global East, to keep reading postsocialist parallels, intersections and demarcations. At the same time, one should not be afraid to localise the “unlabelled” spaces and borderlands yet to be named as tentative ‘Columbias’ and ‘Americas’ by those who seize the right to outline and mark them. In other words, what matters is a liberating engagement with the multi-layered (semi-)peripheries anchored in that position by global coloniality. The question of knowledge production is the cornerstone here, a reference point that risks falling out of sight when applying out-of-place theories and indulging in non-constructive battles.

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