Gulrano Ataeva is a doctoral student researching the history of modern Central Asia whose research explores the entangled histories of gender, labor, and nation under Soviet rule. Her dissertation, Threads of Emancipation: Changing Labor Experiences of Women in the Central Asian City of Osh under Soviet Rule, examines the ways women’s subjectivities unfolded within the Soviet project of political and social transformations. Her study focuses on tracing how local and communist frameworks intersected in shaping the forms of knowledge and selfhood. She explores how these socio-political worlds were lived, contested, and reworked by women in the context of industrial policies, material conditions, family expectations, and cultural and religious frameworks, complicating the state narrative of emancipation.
Along with her research into women's lived experiences, she looks at late Soviet Qur'anic translations and exegetical literature to see how theological and everyday activities became arenas for reinterpreting moral authority in the discursive sphere and remaking the self under changing political order.
She is also interested in cultural production, particularly Soviet Central Asian women’s journals, and how they framed femininity, modernity, and belonging in a rapidly changing political landscape of late state reforms known as Qayra Quruu or Perestroika.
Across her work, she is attentive to the tension between ascribed categories and lived experience and to the ways in which women articulated autonomy within and sometimes against prescribed roles and structural hierarchies.