Tuya Shagdar

Tuya Shagdar, is a graduate student and a researcher at the department of Anthropology and Archaeology at National University of Mongolia. She's also a lecturer of courses related to political anthropology, socialism and post-socialism. Her research interests include studies on informal power institutions, political imagination in 20^th century Mongolian cinema, maps and pastureland management.  During her recruitment at the local department she was a recipient of the Wenner Gren funded Institutional Development Grant for visiting research at University of Cambridge. Her teaching position was funded by the Open Society Academic Fellowship program which enabled her to develop and teach new courses at the department. She was also a recipient of research grant from Swiss Development Agency to study Mongolian Pastoralism and herders' livelihoods from which she retained interest in maps and management of land in rural areas. Recently, she assisted a team of researchers from Helvetas, a Swiss intercooperation to conduct a fieldwork on local homeland associations. Using the data from her ethnographic fieldwork she extended her academic research into the study of an "informal" political mechanism and study of elites. Her upcoming article is titled "Homeland Associations and Production of Informal Power in Mongolia: The Case of Uvs Aimag Nutgiin Zövlöl".

Email: shagdart@gmail.com