“We Love Our Country in Our Own Way”: Youth, Gender, and Nationalism in: The Nazarbayev Generation Youth in Kazakhstan

This ethnographic research is about nationalism, identity, and gender among Kazakhstani Western-educated youth. Main question of this research is: is Western (in this case mostly US-based academic model) within Kazakhstan changes youth perception of "being Kazakh"? My arguments are: a) Kazakhstani youths who have received or are in the process of receiving Western-style education face competing pulls on their ideologies and identities: youths want to be global and cosmopolitan, but they feel substantial pressure from the nationalist mainstream b) gender roles—specifically the idealistic vision of the Kazakh woman projected by the state and expected by a large part of the society is one of the central fields, if not the main field, of conflict between youth and male-centric nationalism c) even if they (youth members) identify themselves as pro-Western and show their cosmopolitan and globalist views in various ways, this part of the Kazakhstani youth also has deep, albeit moderate, nationalist sentiments and senses of belonging to the imagined Kazakh nation and Kazakh culture.