Chapter 21: Cultivating “Citizens of a New Type”: The Politics and Practice of Educational Reform at the American University in Kyrgyzstan

This chapter represents an ethnographic case study of the educational experiment undertaken by the American University in Kyrgyzstan, an institution commit ted, in the words of its founder, to “cultivating citizens of a new type.” By focusing on the politics of educational reform as it has been carried out in one University during a period of particularly intense debate over its future institutional and pedagogical identity, the chapter reflects upon the practices of, and responses to, “westernization” of higher education in Central Asia. In so doing, it engages with wider debates in the anthropology of post-Socialism concerning the multiple local-level implications of the penetration of market logics and languages in the post-Soviet context, and argues for the need to supplement large-scale analyses of educational transformation with ethnographic attention to the ways in which educational “reform” is interpreted by teachers, students and administrators in particular institutional settings.