Out of 279 applications, only 41 received this term’s grant from The Swedish Research Council (VR) and only ten of these for research in social sciences. Last year Rustamjon Urinboyev applied without success.
- This time my application was really good. I received helpful feedback from VR on my previous application and valuable help and feedback from colleagues. Also I have some original ideas, says Rustamjon Urinboyev.
The research aims to look at two different aspects of migration in the context of post-Soviet societies. Many people are migrating to Russia in search of better jobs.
Firstly: What impact does this have on legal cultures? Migrants bring their own perception of the law and of right and wrong with them. To what extent do these new traditions affect Russian legal culture? What coping strategies do migrants, many of them being illiterate, use to interact with the law? This has not been studied before.
Secondly: Out of a population of 30 million in Uzbekistan, eight million, mostly men, are migrating in search of jobs. Many villages are left with mainly women. What affect does this have on gender roles and on the formal work traditionally done by men?
The grant requires at least two out of three years to be spent abroad. For Rustamjon Urinboyev this means going to Cambridge University’s Central Asian Forum in next September and then spending the second year in the Netherlands at the Institute for Management Research, Radboud University, Nijmegen.